



■_M. A- Ymk. H:n']j'ir f^^ Brn-th.'.r' 



SERMONS 



PREACHED AT BRIGHTOJST 



BY THE LATE 



REV. FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON 



THE INCUMBENT OF TRINITY CHAPEL. 



NEW EDITION. 



NEW YORK: 

E. I*. DXJXXOjS- & CO, 

31 WEST 23D STREET, 

1904. 






,f-^^' 



^^^ 









TO 

THE CONGREGATION 



WORSHIPPING IN 



7^ 

rRINITY CHAPEL, BRIGHTON, 

From August 15, 1847, to August 15, 1853, 

THESE 

RECOLLECTIONS OF SERMONS 

PREACHED BY THEIR LATE PASTOR 

ARE DEDICATED. 



PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION. 



In publishing these Sermons, a few words of explana- 
tion are necessary. 

They are not notes previously prepared, nor are they 
Sermons written before delivery. They are simply " Kec- 
ollections:" sometimes dictated by the Preacher himself 
to the 3^ounger members of a family in which he was inter- 
ested, at their urgent entreaty; sometimes written out by 
himself for them when they were at a distance and unable 
to attend his ministry.* 

They have been carefully preserved, and are now pub- 
lished without corrections or additions, just as they were 
found. Mr. Robertson attached no value whatever to 
them, and never gave any directions concerning them. 
The only Sermon which saw the light in his lifetime is 
now republished in this volume, with his own preface, ex- 
plaining how it was preserved, and that it was printed by 
desire of his congregation. 

Unfortunately, in some instances this series is incom- 
plete. The fourth of the Advent Lectures f was never 
written out, owing to his uncertain and suffering state of 
health; and this cause, combined with his remarkable dis- 
like to recalling his discourses — a peculiarity known to all 
who were intimately acquainted with him — has made these 

* A reference to a paragraph in his own preface to " The Israelite's Grave" 
(page 235) explains this. 

t The fourth and last Advent Lecture was "The Jewish;" on the text, 
" He came unto his own, and his own received him not." — John i. 11. 



vi Preface, 

recollections more broken and imperfect than they would 
otherwise have been. 

It is not necessary to say one word in this place of the 
character of Mr. Kobertson's teaching; it is best illustrated 
in the published volumes of his Sermons; and yet it seems 
needful to say, that even these suggest but a very faint idea 
of the influence that teaching exercised on all who came 
within its sphere. 



PREFACE TO THE FOURTH SERIES. 



It is proposed shortly to issue a volume entitled " Pulpit 
Notes," which will consist of the skeleton or outline which 
Mr. Kobertson prepared before delivering his Sermons. In 
some cases only a line or a single word is given to indicate 
a division of his subject; in others he has written out a 
whole thought, to be further amplified and completed in 
course of preaching. 

The Editor believes that such a volume will be of serv- 
ice in two ways — first, as offering suggestions to preachers 
in the preparation or consideration of their addresses; and, 
secondly, as being sufficiently complete for purposes of 
home-reading where it is the custom at family prayers, or 
on Sundays, to read a short discourse, occupying but a few 
minutes. 

With reference to the first of these, it seems to be felt 
very generally that the pulpit is not what it was originally 
intended to be. There is a wide-spread opinion that it 
was designed for the edification of the mind as well as the 
heart; and it may be that one great cause of the indiffer- 
ence with which men are said to listen to preachers, arises 
from the fact, that for the most part their addresses are far 
below the intelligence of their audience, who are wearied 
with the trite repetitions of platitudes that neither instruct 
nor inform. These Sermons and "Pulpit Notes" evidence 
the character of a teaching, not only earnestly listened to, 
but also most influential. Perhaps the contrast between 



viii Preface, 

these and tlie sermons usually preached, may suggest a 
means of re-awakening an interest now almost dormant in 
the minds of listeners. In this view, a volume will shortly 
be issued, and if it be found successful another will be put 
to press. 

The Editor appends a portion of a letter from a friend 
on the subject of preaching, because it serves to show that 
the indifference he has adverted to springs from other 
causes than mere irreligiousness. 

Mt dear , — I think one great need in our pulpit ministrations is nat- 
uralness ; by which I mean an exact recognition of the facts of our daily life. 
The phrase, "the dignity of the pulpit," has given a fatally artificial charac- 
ter to the mass of sermons, Mr, Spurgeon and his vulgar slang is a violent 
reaction from the cold unfelt conventionalities with which men have grown 
so familiar ; and his success is due to the fact that he recognizes the men 
and women before him as flesh and blood — sinning, suffering, tempted, fail- 
ing, struggling, rising. Like aU extreme reactions, it shocks a great many 
by its levity, its irreverence, and its vulgarity. 

But it is in this direction must come our pulpit reform. We come day after 
day to God's house, and the most careless one of us there, is still one who, if 
he could really hear a word from God to his own soul, would listen to it — 
ay, and be thankful for it. No heart can tell out to another what waves of 
temptation have been struggled through during the week past — with what 
doubtful success. How, after the soul has been beaten down and defiled, 
with what bitter anguish of spirit it has awoke to a knowledge of its back- 
slid ings and its bondage to sin : — not to this or that sin merely, but to a gen- 
eral sense of sinfulness pervading the whole man, so that Redemption would 
be indeed a joyful sound. 

Many are miserable in their inmost hearts, who are light-hearted and gay 
before the world. They feel that no heart understands theirs, or can help 
them. Now, suppose the preacher goes down into the depths of his own 
being, and has the courage and fidelity to cany all he finds there, first to God 
in confession and prayer, and then to his flock as some part of the general 
experience of Humanity, do you not feel that he must be toucliing close upon 
some brother-man's sorrows and wants? "Be ye as I am, for I am as ye 
are," Many a weary and heavy-laden soul has taken his burden to the Sav- 
iour, because he has found some man of "like passions with himself," wlio 
has suffered as he has, and found relief, I tliink a bold faithful experimental 
preaching rarely fails to hit some mark, and oftentimes God's S])irit wifncssea 
to the truth of what is said, by rousing this and that man to the feeling, 



Preface, ^X 

** Why I, too, have been agonizing, and falling, and crying for just such help 
as this. Ah, this man has indeed something to say to me." 



I may be wrong in my opinion, but it is one of deep conviction, gained 
long ago, that no amount of external evidence in the way of proof of the 
truth of Christianity is worth any thing in the way of saving a human 
soul. 

There is always as much to be said on one side as the other, because, just 
as Archimedes could not move the earth without a fulcrum, so there must be 
something taken for granted in all external evidence, which a rigid logician 
might fairly demur to granting. But when, as with the Spirit of God, the 
voice of a man reaches his fellow-man, telling him of his inner aspirations 
and failures, his temptations, his sins, his Aveakness — not in generals, but in 
details — of light that has come and has been extinguished ; of hopes bom, 
yet not nourished ; of fears which have gi'own stronger and stronger, and 
which refuse altogether to be silent, even in the midst of the engagements or 
pleasures of life — does not the man feel that here is a revelation of God's 
truth as real and fresh as if he had stood in the streets of Jerasalem, and 
heard the Saviour's very voice ? The man feels that, in this word, which has, 
so to speak, "told him all that ever he did," there must be a divine life. 
"One touch of natm-e makes the whole word kin." 



I think that a ministry which should work mightily amongst a people 
would be one in which very rarely is heard any development of the modus 
operandi or '■''plan of salvation ;" in which proof of the di\'ine mission of 
Christ, or of God's revelation, was never attempted, but in which the great 
facts themselves were set forth as the alone solution of the wants, son-ows, 
and sins of the hearers ; in which the fact of Adam's fall, and any conse- 
quences it had on the human race, Avere only touched upon incidentally ; 
but in which the individual man's fall was pressed home upon him from his 
own certain convictions. Not because Adam fell, and the race fell in him, 
but because you have fallen — therefore you need a Saviour, and divine life 
and Hght are indispensable. 

The man who quietly slumbers under Adam's sin and its tremendous con- 
sequences — his relation to which consequences how is it possible for a poor 
uneducated person to comprehend ? — may be aroused to a sense of his con- 
nection with the fact of a fall in himself, and a need of such a restorer as 
Christ. I am sure I don't know whether this is orthodox or not; but I 
doubt whether orthodox creeds and confessions of doctrine have ever turned 
one soul from the error of his ways, or brought him in real earaest to Christ 
******** 



Preface, 



Let lis look at this boldly. Seventeen thousand pulpits echo in our land 
every Sunday, to what each preacher considers the soundest form of Christ's 
Gospel. Is it God's word that is preached ? Has He changed His purpose ? 
Has He ceased to care for man? — and does He no longer intend that ''His 
word shall not return to him void ?" Yet where is the divine evidence that 
it is His word which is preached, as shown in hearts quickened and aroused 
" about their Father's business ?" 



CONTENTS. 



^fr»t Scries, 

SERMON I. 

Preached AprU 29, 1849. 

GOD'S REVELATION OF HEAVEN. 

1 Cor. ii. 9, 10.—" Eye hath not seen, nor 
ear heard, neither have entered into the 
heart of raan, the things which God hath 
prepared for them that love him. But 
God hath revealed them unto us by his 
Spirit" Page 23 



SERMON II. 

Preached June 6, 1849. 

PARABLE OF THE SOWER. 

CONFIEMATION LECTUKE. 

Matt. xiii. 1-9. — "The same day vv^ent Je- 
6US out of the house, and sat by the sea- 
side. And great multitudes were gath- 
ered together unto him, so that he went 
into a ship, and sat ; and the whole mul- 
titude stood on the shore. And he spake 
many things unto them in parables, say- 
ing, Behold, a sower went forth to sow ; 
and when he sowed, some seeds fell by 
the wayside, and the fowls came and de- 
voured them up : Some fell upon stony 
places, where they had not much earth : 
and forthwith they sprung up, because 
they had no deepness of earth: And 
•when the sun was up, they were scorch- 
ed; and because they had no root, they 
withered away. And some fell among 
thorns ; and the thorns sprung up, and 
choked them : But others fell mto good 
ground, and brought forth fruit, some a 
hundred-fold, some sixty-fold, some thir- 
ty-fold. Who hath ears k) hear, let him 
bear" 33 



SERMON in. 

Preached June 10, 1849. 

JACOB'S WRESTLING. 

OONFIBMATION LEOTUBE. 

Gbn. xxxii. 28, 29. — "And he said. Thy 
name shall be called no more Jacob, but 
Israel: for as a prince hast thou power 
with God and with men, and hast pre- 
yailed. And Jacob asked him, and said. 



Tell me, I pray thee, thy name, ind 
he said. Wherefore is it that thou dost 
ask after my name? And he blessed 
him there " Page 46 



SERMON IV. 

Preached August 12, 1849. 

CHRISTIAN PROGRESS BY OBLIVION 
OF THE PAST. 

Phil. lii. 13, 14.— "Brethren, I count not 
myself to have apprehended : but this 
one thing I do, forgetting those things 
which are behind, and reaching forth 
unto those things which are before, I 
press toward the mark for the prize of 
the high calling of God in Christ Je- 
sus" 57 



SERMON V. 

Preached October 21, 1849. 

TRIUMPH OVER HINDRANCES— 
ZACCHEUS. 

LxTKE xix. 8.— "And Zaccheus stood, and 
said unto the Lord ; Behold, Lord, the 
half of my goods I give to the poor ; and 
if I have taken any thing from any man 
by false accusation, I restore him four- 
fold" 66 



SERMON VI. 

Preached October 28, 1849. 

THE SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE OP 
THE SABBATH. 

CoL. ii. 16, 17. — " Let no man therefore 
judge you in meat, or in drink, or in re- 
spect of a holyday, or of the new moon, 
or of the sabbath- days : Which are a 
shadow of things to come ; but the body 
is of Christ" T8 



SERMON VII. 

Preached November 4, 1849. 

THE SYMPATHY OF CHRIST. 

Heb. iv. 15, 16.—" For we have not a high- 
priest which can not be touched with 
the feeling of our infirmities ; but waa 



Xll 



Contents, 



in all points tempted like as wc are, yet 
without sin. Let us therefore come 
boldly unto the throne of grace, that we 
may obtain mercy, and find grace to help 
in time of need " Page 88 



SERMON VIII. 

Preached November 11, 1849. 

PHARISEES AND SADDUCEES AT 
JOHN'S BAPTISM. 

Matt. iii. 7.—" But when he saw many of 
the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his 
baptism, he said unto them, O genera- 
tion of vipers, who hath warned you to 
flee from the wrath to come ?" 99 



SERMON IX. 

Preached November 5, 1849. 

CAIAPHAS'S VIEW OF VICARIOUS 
SACRIFICE. 

John xi. 49-53. — "And one of them, named 
Caiaphas,being the high-priestthat same 
year, said unto them. Ye know nothing 
at all, nor consider that it is expedient 
for us, that one man should die for the 
people, and that the whole nation perish 
not. And this spake he not of himself: 
but being high-priest that year, he proph- 
esied that Jesus should die for that na- 
tion ; and not for that nation only, but 
that also he should gather together in 
one the children of God that were scat- 
tered abroad. Then from that day forth 
they took counsel together for to put him 
to death". 110 



SERMON X. 

Preached December 2, 1849. 

REALIZING THE SECOND ADVENT. 

Job xix. 25-27.—" For I know that my Re- 
deemer liveth, and that he shall stand 
at the latter day upon the earth : And 
though after my skin worms destroy this 
body, yet in my flesh shall I see God : 
Whom I shall see for myself, and mine 
eyes shall behold, and not another ; 
though my reins be consumed within 
me •• 120 



SERMON XI. 

Preach«d December 6, 1849. 

FIRST ADVENT LECTURE. 

THE GREEK. 

poM. i. 14-17.— "I am debtor both to the 
Greeks, and to the Barbarians; both to 
the wise, and to the unwise. So, as much 
as in me is, I am ready to preach the 
gospel to you that are at Rome also. 
For I am 'not nehamed of the gospel 
of Christ: for it is the power of God 



unto salvation to every one that believ. 
eth ; to the Jew first, and also to the 
Greek. For therein is the righteous- 
ness of God revealed from faith to faith : 
as it is written, The just shall live by 
faith " Page 1 30 



SERMON XII. 

Preached December 13,1849. 

SECOND ADVENT LECTURE. 

THE ROMAN. 

RoM. i. 14-16.— "I am debtor both to the 
Greeks, and to the Barbarians; both to 
the wise, and to the unwise. So, as much 
as in me is, I am ready to preach the gos- 
pel to you that are at Rome also. For I 
am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: 
for it is the power of God unto salvation 
to every one that believeth ; to the Jew 
first, and also to the Greek " 137 



SERMON XIII. 

Preached December 20, 1849. 

THIRD ADVENT LECTURE. 

TUE liAKBARIAN. 

Acts xxviii. 1-7.— "And when they were 
escaped, then they knew that the island 
was called Melita. And the barbarous 
people showed us no little kindness : for 
they kindled a fire, and received us every 
one, because of the present rain, and be- 
cause of the cold. And when Paul had 
gathered a bundle of sticks, and laid them 
on the fire, there came a viper out of the 
heat, and fastened on his hand. And 
when the barbarians saw the venomous 
beast hang on his hand, they said among 
themselves, No doubt this man is a mur- 
derer, whom, though he hath escaped the 
sea, yet vengeance suff'ereth not to live. 
And he shook off the beast into the fire, 
and felt no harm. Howbeit they looked 
when he should have swollen, or fallen 
down dead suddenly : but after they had 
looked a great while, and saw no harm 
come to him, they changed their minds, 
aad said that he was a god. In the same 
quarters were possessions of the chief 
man of the island, whose name was Pub- 
lius; who received u.s, and lodged us 
three days courteously " 148 



SERMON XIV. 
Preached December 15, 1849. 

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE SPIRITUAL 
HARVEST. 

Gai„ vi. 7, 8.—" Be not deceived ; God is 
not mocked : for whatsoever a man sow- 
eth, that shall he also reap. For he that 
soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap 
corruption ; but he that soweth to the 
Si)irit shall of the Spirit reap life ever- 
lasting" iw 



Contents, 



Xlll 



SERMON XV, 

Preached December 31, 1849. 

THE LONELINESS OF CHRIST. 

/oHN xvi. 31, 32.— "Jesus answered them, 
Do ye now believe ? Behold, the hour 
Cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall 
be scattered, every man to his own, and 
shall leave me alone: and yet I am 
rot alone, because the Father is with 
me" Page 168 



SERMON XVI. 

Preached October 20, 1850. 

THE NEW COMMANDMENT OF LOVE 
TO ONE ANOTHER. 

/ John xiii. 34.— "A new commandment I 
give unto you, That ye love one another ; 
as I have loved you, that ye also love one 
another" 177 



SERMON XVII. 

Preached June 15, 1851. 

THE MESSAGE OF THE CHURCH TO 
MEN OF WEALTH. 

1 Sam. XXV. 10, 11.— "And Nabal answered 
David's servants, and said, Who is Da- 
vid? and who is the son of Jesse ? there 
be many servants nowadays that break 
away every man from his master. Shall 
I then take my bread, and my water, and 
my flesh that I have killed for my shear- 
ers, and give it unto men, whom I know 
not whence they be ?" 185 



SERMON XVIII. 
Preached June 22, 1851. 

CHRIST'S JLT)GMENT RESPECTING 
INHERITANCE. 

LtJKE xii. 13-15.— "And one of the com- 
pany said unto him, Master, speak to 
my brother, that he divide the inherit- 
ance with me. And he said unto him, 
Man, who made me a judge or a divider 
overyrtu? And he said unto them, Take 
heed, and beware of covetonsness ; for a 
man's life cousisteth not in the abun- 
dance of the things which he possess- 
«th" 198 



SERMON XIX. 

Preached July 13,1851. 

FREEDOM BY THE TRUTH. 



SERMON XX. 

Preached at the Autumn Assizes, held at Lewes, 18521 

THE KINGDOM OF THE TRUTH. 

John xviii. 37. — " Pilate therefore said 
unto him. Art thou a king then ? Jesus 
answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. 
To this end was I born, and for this 
cause came I into the world, that I 
should bear witness iinto the truth. 
Every one that is of the truth hearetli 
my voice " Page 21§ 



SERMON XXI. 
Preached November 7, 1852. 

THE SKEPTICISM OF PILATE. 

John xviii. 38. — "Pilate saith unto him. 
What is truth ?" 226 

SERMON XXII. 

Preached on the first day of Public Mourning for the 
Queen Dowager, Dec. 1849. 

THE ISRAELITE'S GRAVE IN A 
FOREIGN LAND. 

Gen. 1. 24-26.— "And Joseph said unto his 
brethren, I die ; and God will surely visit 
you, and bring you out of this land unto 
the land which he sware to Abraham, to 
to Isaac, and to Jacob. And Joseph 
took an oath of the children of Israel, 
saying, God will surely visit you, and ye 
shall carry up mj' bones from hence. So 
Joseph died, being a hundred and ten 
years old : and they embalmed him, and 
he was put in a coffin in Egypt "... . 236 



SecontJ Series. 

SERMON I. 

Preached Januarj' 6, 1850. 

rHE STAR IN THE EAST. 

MATT.ii. 1, 2.— "Now when Jesus was bom 
in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of 
Herod the king, behold, there came wise 
men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, 
Where is he that is born King of the 
Jews ? for Ave have seen his star in the 
east, and are come to worship him ". 249 



SERMON II. 

Preached February 10, 1850. 

THE HEALING OF JAIRUS'S DAUGH- 
TER. 



John viii. 32.— "And ve shall know the i Matt. ix. 23-25.— "And when Jesus camo 
trath, and the truth shall make yon into the ruler's house, and saw the min- 
free" "2091 strels and the people making a noise, 



XIV 



Contents, 



he said unto them, Give place : for the 
maid is not dead, but sleepeth. And 
they laughed him to scoru. But wheu 
the people were put forth, he weut iu, 
and took her by the hand, and the maid 
arose " Page 257 



SERMON III. 

Preached March 10, 1850. 

BAPTISM. 

ifAl*. ill. 26-29.— "For ye are all the chil- 
dren of God by faith in Christ Jesus. 
For as many of you as have been bap- 
tized into Christ have put on Christ. 
Thert is neither Jew nor Greek, there 
is neither bond nor free, there is neither 
male nor female : for ye are all one in 
Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ's, 
then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs 
according to the promise " 2C7 



SERMON IV. 

Preached March 17, 1850. 

BAPTISM. 

1 Peteb iii. 21. — "The like figure where- 
unto even baptism doth also now save 
us" 277 



SERMON V. 

Preached October 13, 1950. 

ELIJAH. 

1 Kings xix. 4.— "But he himself went a 
day's journey into the wilderness, and 
came and sat'down under a juniper-tree : 
and he requested for himself that he 
might die; and said, It is enough; now, 
9 Lord, take away my life ; for I am not 
better than my fathers " 286 



SERMON VI. 

P.eached January 12, 1851. 

NOTES ON PSALM LL 

tlTritten by David, after a double crime :— 
Uriah put in the fore-front of the battle 
— the wife of the murdered man taken, 
etc. 293 



SERMON . VII. 

Preached March 3, 1851. 

OBEDIENCE THE ORGAN OF SPIR- 
ITUAL KNOWLEDGE. 

^Hw vii. 17.— "If any man will do his 
will, he shall know of the doctrine, 
whether it be of God, or whether I speak 
of myself" .. 300 



SERMON VITI. ) 

Preached March 30, 1851. 

RELIGIOUS DEPRESSION. 

Psalm xlii. 1-3.— "As the hart panteth 
after the watei brooks, so panteth my 
soul after thee, O God. My soul thirst* 
etn for God, for the living God : when 
shall I come and appear before God? 
My tears have been my meat day and 
night, while they continually say unto 
me, Where is thy God ?" Page 308 



SERMON IX. 

Preached April 6,1851. 

FAITH OF THE CENTURION. 

Matt. viii. 10. — " When Jesus heard it, he 
marvelled, and said to them that follow- 
ed. Verily I say unto you, I have not 
found so great faith, no, not in Is- 
rael" 313 



SERMON X. 

Preached July 27, 1851. 

THE RESTORATION OF THE 
ERRING. 

Gal. vi. 1, 2.—" Brethren, if a man be over- 
taken in a fault, ye which are spiritualj 
restore such a one in the spirit of meek- 
ness ; considering thyself, lest thou also 
be tempted. Bear ye one another's 
burdens, and so fulfill the law of 
Christ" 318 



SERMON XI. 

Preached Christmas Day, 1851. 

CHRIST THE SON. 

Heb. i. 1, 2.— " God, who at sundry times 
and in divers manners spake m time 
past unto the fathers by the prophets, 
hath in these last days spoken unto us 
by his Son" S2I 



SERMON XII. 

Preached April 25, 185J. 

WORLDLINESS 

1 John ii. 15-17. — "If any man love the 
world, the love of the Father is not in 
him. For all that is in the world, the 
lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, 
aud the pride of life, is not of the Fa- 
ther, but is of the world. And the world 
Kasseth away, and the lust thereof: bnt 
e that doeth the will of God p.bideth 
forever " 3*8^ 



Contents. 



XV 



SERMON XIII. 

Preached November 14, 1855 

THE SYDENHAM PALACE, AND THE 
RELIGIOUS NON-OBSERVANCE OF 
THE SABBATH. 

Rom. xiv. 5, 6.— "One man esteemeth one 
day above another : another esteemeth 
every day alike. Lei every man be fully 
persuaded in his own mind. He that 
regardeth the day, regardeth it uuto f\v& 
Lord; and he that "regardeth not the 
day, to the Lord he doth not regard it. 
He that eateth, eateth to the Lord for he 
giveth God thanks; and he that eateth 
not, to the Lord he eateth not, and giveth 
God thanks ". Page 343 



SERMON XIV. 

Prsached Jannsry 2, 1853. 

THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF 
JESUS. 

Luke ii. 40. — "And the child grew, and 
waxed strong in spirit, filled with wis- 
dom ; and the grace of God was upon 
him" 353 



SERMON XV. 

Preached January 9, 1853. 

CHRIST'S ESTIMATE OF SIN, 

LcKE xix. 10.—" The Son of man is come 
to seek and to save that which was 
lost " 363 



SERMON XVI. 

Preached January 16, 1853 

THE SANCTIFICATION OF CHRIST. 

John xvii. 19.— "And for their sakes I 
sanctify myself, that they also might be 
sanctified through the truth " 372 

SERMON XVII. 

Preached January 23, 1853. 

THE FIRST MIRACLE. 

1. THE GLOEY OF THE VIKGIN MOTHER. 

John ii. 11.— "This beginning of miracles 
did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and man- 
ifested forth his glory ; and his disciples 
believed on him " 383 

SERMON XVIII. 

Preached January 30, 1S53. 

THE FIRST MIRACLE. 

n. THE OI.OEY OF THE DrVTNE SON. 

John \\. 11.— "This beginning of miracles 
did J«sus in Cana of Galilee, and man- 



ifested forth his glory ; and his disciples 
believed on him^' Page 393 



SERMON XIX. 
Preached March 20, 1853. 

THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 

John x. 14, 15.—" I am the good shepherd- 
and know my sheep, and am known or 
mine. As the Father knoweth me, even 
so know I the Father: and I lay down 
my life for the sheep " 404 



SERMON XX. 

Preached Easter Day, March 27, 1853. 

THE DOUBT OF THOMAS. • 

John xx. 29. — "Jesus saith unto him, 
Thomas, because thou hast seen me, 
thou hast believed: blessed are they 
that have not seen, and yet have be- 
lieved " 415 



SERMON XXI. 

Preached May 8, 1853. 

THE IRREPARABLE PAST. 

Makk XIV. 41, 42 — "And he cometh the 
third time, and saith unto them. Sleep 
on now, and take your rest : it is enough, 
the hour is come ; behold the Son of man 
is betrayed into the hands of sinners. 
Rise up, let us go ; lo, he that betrayeth 
me is at hand" 42« 



EtJirti Series. 

SERMON I. 

Preached April 28, 1850. 

THE TONGUE. 

St. James iii. 5, 6. — " Even so the tongue 
is a little member, and boasteth great 
things. Behold, how great a matter a 
little fire kindleth ! And the tongue is 
a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the 
tongue among our members, that it de- 
fileth the whole body, and setteth on 
fire the course of nature; and it is set 
on fire of hell " 43T 



SERMON II. 

Preached May 5, 1850. 

THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 

1 John v. 4, 5.— "For whatsoever is bom 
of God overcometh the world: and tbia 
is theyictory that overcometh the world, 
even our faith. Who is he that over- 
cometh the world, but he thnt believeth 
that Josus is the Son of God?" 444 



XVI 



Contents, 



SERMON III. 

Preached Whitsunday, May 19, I80O. 

THE DISPENSATION OF THE 
SPIRIT. 

i Cob. xii. 4.— "Now there are diversities 
of gifts, but the same Spirit "..Page 455 

SERMON IV. 
Preached May 26, 1850. 

THE TRINITY. 

1 Thesb. v. 23.— "And the very God of 
peace sanctify you wholly ; and I pray 
God yocr whole spirit and soul and body 
be preserved blameless unto the coming 
of our Lord Jesus Christ " 464 

SERMON V. 

PreachedJuneS, 1850. 

ABSOLUTION. 

LtTKE V. 21. --"And the scribes and the 
Pharisees began to reason, saying, 
Who is. this which speaketh blasphe- 
mies ? Who can forgive sins, but God 
aloue ?" 476 



SERMON VI. 

Preached June 9, 1850. 

THE fLLUSIVENESS OF LIFE. 

Heb. xi. 8-10.—" By faith Abraham, when 
he was called to go out into a place 
which he should after receive for an in- 
heritance, obeved; and he went out, 
not knowing whither he went. By faith 
he sojourned in the land of promise, as 
in a strance country, dwelling iu taber- 
nacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs 
with him of the same promise : for he 
looked for a city which hath founda- 
tions, whose builder and maker is 
God " 487 



SERMON VII. 

Preached June 23, 1850. 

THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST. 

8 Cor. v. 14. 15.— "For the love of Christ 
constraineth us ; because we thus judge, 
that if one died for all, then were all 
dead: and that he died for all, that 
they which live should not henceforth 
live unto themselves, but unto him which 
died for them, and rose again " 495 



SERMON VIII. 

Preached June 30, 1850. 

THE POWER OF SORROW. 
% Cou vii. 9, 10.— "Now I rejoice, not that 
ye wore made sorry, but that ye sorrow- 



ed to repentance: for ye were made 
sorry after a godly manner, that ye 
might receive damage by us in nothing. 
For godlv sorrow worketh repentance 
to salvation not to be repented of: but 
the sorrow of the world worketh 
death " Page 504 



SERMON IX. 
Preached August 4, 1850. ^ 

SENSUAL AND SPIRITUAL EXCITE- 
MENT. 

Eph. v. 1T,18.—" Wherefore be j'e not un- 
wise, but understanding what the will 
of the Lord is. And be not drunk with 
wine, wherein is excess; but be filled 
with the Spirit " 510 

SERMON X. 

Preached August 11, 1850. 

PURITY. 

Titus i. 15.— "Unto the pure all thinga 
are pure: but unto them that are de- 
filed and unbelieving is nothing pure; 
but even their mind and conscience la 
defiled" ° 516 

SERMON XI. 
Preached February 9, 1851. 

UNITY AND PEACE. 

CoL. iii. 15.— "And let the peace of God 
rule in your hearts, to the which also ye 
are called in one body ; and be ye thank- 
ful" 5'^2 



SERMON XII. 

Preached January 4, 1855. 

THE CHRISTIAN AIM AND MOTIVE. 

Matt. v. 48. — " Be ye therefore perfect, 
even as your Father which is iu heaven 
is perfect " 530 



SERMON XIII. 

Preached January 4,1852. 

CHRISTIAN CASUISTRY. 

1 Cor vii. 18-24. — "Is any man called 
bein's circumcised? let him not become 
uncircumcised. Is any called in uucir. 
cumcision? let him not be circumcised. 
Circumcision is nothing, and uuciruum- 
cision is nothing, but the keeping of the 
commandments of God. Let every man 
abide in the same calling wherein h« 
was called. Art thou called being a 
servant? care not for it: but if thou 
mayest be made free, use it rather. 
For he that is called in the Lord, being 
a servant, is the Lord's freemnu : like- 
wise also he that is called, being fre«i 



Contents, 



xvii 



fis Christ's servant. Ye are bought with 
a price ; be not ye the servants of men. 
Brethren, let every man, wherein he is 
called, therein abide with God". Page 539 



SERMON XIV. 

Preached January 11, 1852. 

MARRIAGE AND CELIBACY. 

1 Cob. vii. 29-31.— "But this I say, breth- 
ren, the time is short: it remaiueth, that 
both they that have wives be as though 
they had none ; and they that weep, as 
though they wept not ; and they that re- 
joice, as though they rejoiced not ; and 
they that buy, as though they possessed 
not ; and they that use this world, as 
not abusing it : for the fashion of this 
world passeth away " 547 



SEKMON XV. 

PreachedJanuary 11, 1852. 

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH A FAM- 
ILY. 

Eph. iii. 14, 15.— "Our Lord Jesus Christ, 
of whom the whole family in heaven 
and earth is named " 556 



SERMON XVI. 

Preached January 25, 1852. 

THE LAW OP CHRISTIAN CON- 
V SCIENCE. 

1 CoE. viii, 7-13.— "Howbeit there is not 
in every man that knowledge : for some 
with conscience of the idol unto this 
hour eat it as a thing offered unto an 
idol; and their conscience being weak 
is defiled. But meat commendeth us 
not to God : for neither, if we eat, are 
we the better ; neither, if we eat not, 
are we the worse. But take heed lest 
by any means this liberty of yours be- 
come a stumbling-block to them that 
are weak. For if any man see thee 
which hast knowledge sit at meat in 
the idol's temple, shall not the con- 
science of him which is weak be em- 
boldened to eat those things which are 
offered to idols ; and through thy knowl- 
edge shall the weak brother perish, for 
whom Christ died ? But when ye sin so 
against the brethren, and wound their 
weak conscience, ye sin against Christ. 
Wherefore, if meat make my brother to 
offend, I will eat no flesh while the 
(Vorid etandeth, lest I make my brother 
to offend" 565 



SERMON XVII. 

Preached May 16,1852. 

VICTORY OVER DEATH. 

I Cob. XV. 56, 57.— "The sting of death is 
sin; and the strength of siu is the law. 



But thanks be to God, which giveth us 
the victory through our Lord Jesua 
Christ " : . . . Page 578 



MAN' 



SERMON XVIII. 

Preached June 20, 1852. 

GREATNESS AND GOD'S 
GREATNESS. 



IsA. Ivii. 15. — " For thus saith the high and 
lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose 
name is Holy ; I dwell in the high and 
holy place, with him also that is of a 
contrite and humble spirit." 588 



SERMON XIX. 

Preached June 27, 1852. 

THE LAWFUL AND UNLAWFUL USE 
OF LAW. 

A FEA6MENT. 

1 Tim. i. 8. — " But we know that the law 
is good, if a man use it lawfully ". . . 598 



SERMON XX. 

Preached February 21,1853. 

THE PRODIGAL AND HIS BROTHER. 

Luke xv. 31, 32. — "And he said unto him. 
Son, thou art ever with me, and all that 
I have is thine. It was meet that we 
should make merry, and be glad: for 
this thy brother was dead, and is alive 
again ; and was lost, and is found ". 603 



SERMON XXI. 

Preached May 15,1853. 

JOHN'S REBUKE OF HEROD. 

Luke iii. 19, 20.—" But Herod the tetrarch, 
being reproved by him for Herodias, 
his brother Philip's wife, and for all the 
evils which Herod had done, added yet 
this above all, that he shut up John in 
prison" 614 



if ourti) Series. 

SERMON I. 

Preaehed January, 1848. 

THE CHARACTER OF ELL 

1 Sam. iii. 1.— "And the child Samuel mini 
istered unto the Lord before Eli. And 
the word of the Lord was precious in 
those days ; there was no open vi.s- 
ion" C2i 



xvni 



Contents. 



SERMON II. 

Preached March, 1848. 

THE APPOINTMENT OF THE FIRST 
KING IN ISRAEL. 

1 Sam. xii. 1.— "Aud Samuel said unto all 
Israel, Behold, I have hearkened uuto 
your voice in all that ye said uuto me, aud 
nave made a king over you ". . .Page G3S 



SERMON III. 

PRAYER. 

Matt. xxvi. 39.— "And he went a little 
further, and fell on his face, and prayed, 
saying, O my Father, if it be possible, 
let this cup pass from me : nevertheless, 
not as I will, but as thou wilt " 644 



SERMON IV. 

Preached January 25, 1852. 

PERVERSION, AS SHOWN IN BA- 
LAAM'S CHARACTER. 

Numb. xxii. 34, 35. — "And Balaam said 
unto the angel of the Lord, I have 
sinned ; for I knew not that thou stood- 
est in the way against me : now there- 
fore, if It displease thee, I will get me 
back again. And the angel of the Lord 
said unto Balaam, Go with the men : 
but only the word that I shall speak 
unto thee, that thou shalt speak. So 
Balaam went with the princes of Ba- 
lak" 651 



SERMON V. 

Preached February 1, 1852. 

SELFISHNESS, AS SHOWN IN 



BA- 



LAAM'S CHARACTER. 



Numb, xxiii. 10. — "Who can count the 
dust of Jacob, and the number of the 
fourth part of Israel ? Let me die the 
death of the righteous, and let my last 
end be like his 1" 657 



SERMON Yl, 

Preached Peceraber 28, 1851. 

THE TRANSITORINESS OF LIFE. 

Pbalm xc. 12. — "So teach us to number 
our days, that we may apply our hearts 
unto wisdom " 663 



SERMON VII. 

Preached July 7, 1850. 

VIEWS OF DEATH. 

Ern.FS. ii. 15, 16.— "Then said I in my 
heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it 



happeneth even to me ; and why was 1 
then more wise? Then I said in my 
heart, that this also is vanity. For there 
is no remembrance of the wise more 
than of the fool forever ; seeing that 
which now is in the days to come shall 
all be forgotten. And how dieth the 
wise man ? as the fool " Page 670 



SERMON VIII. 

Preached December 12, 1852. 

WAITING FOR THE SECOND AD-. 
VENT. 

2 Thess. lii. 5.— "And the Lord direct your 
hearts into the love of God, and into the 
patient waiting for Christ " 674 



SERMON IX. 

Preached November 18, 1849. 

THE SINLESSNESS OF CHRIST. 

1 John iii. 4, 5. — " Whosoever committeth 
sin transgresseth also the law : for sin 
is the transgression of the law. And ye 
know that he was manifested to take 
away our sins ; and in him is no 
sin" 680 



SERMON X. 

Preached November 9, 1851. 

CHRIST'S WAY OF DEALING WITH 
SIN. 

Mark ii. 8-11. — "And immediately, when 
Jesus perceived in his spirit that they 
so reasoned within themselves, he said 
unto them. Why reason ye these things 
in your hearts'? Whether is it easier 
to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins 
be forgiven thee : or to say, Arise, aud 
take up thy bed, and walk? But that 
ye may know that the Son of man hath 
power on earth to forgive sins, (he saith 
to the sick of the palsy,) I say unto thee, 
Arise, and take up thy bied, and go thy 
way into thine house " 690 



SERMON XI. 

Preached June 6, 1853. 

REGENERATION. 

John iii. .5-7. — "Jesus answered. Verily, 
verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be 
born" of water and of the Spirit, he can 
not enter into the kinsrdom of God. 
That which is bora of the flesh is flesh; 
and that which is born of the Spirit is 
spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, 
Ye must be born ay;aiu " 69' 



Contents. 



XiX 



SERMON XII. 

Preached July 4, 1852. 

AN ELECTION SERMON. 

A.0T8 i. 23-26.— "And they appointed two, 
Joseph called Barsabas, who was sur- 
named Justus, aud Matthias. And they 
prayed, and said, Thou, Lord, which 
knowest the hearts of all men, shew 
whether of these two thou hast chosen, 
that he may take part of this ministry 
and apostleship, from which Judas by 
transgression fell, that he might go to 
his own place. And they gave forth 
their lots; and the lot fell upon Mat- 
thias ; and he was numbered with the 
eleven apostles " Page 704 



SEKMON XIII. 

Preached November 24, 1850. 

ISAAC BLESSING HIS SONS. 

Gen. xxvii. 1-4. — "And it came to pass, 
that when Isaac was old, and his eyes 
were dim, so that he could not see, he 
called Esau his eldest son, and said 
unto him. My son: and he said unto 
him, Behold, here am I. And he said, 
Behold now, I am old, I know not the 
day of my death: Now therefore take, 
I pray thee, thy weapons, thy quiver 
and thy bow, and go out to the field, 
and take me some venison ; and make 
me savory meat, such as I love, and bring 
it to me, that I may eat ; that my soul 
may bless thee before I die " 710 



SERMON xrr. 

Preached April, 1849. 

SALVATION OUT OF THE VISIBLE 
■ CHUECH. 

Acts ix. 36. — "Now there was at Joppa a 
certain disciple named Tabitha, which 
by interpretation is called Dorcas: this 
woman was full of good works and 
almsdeeds which she did," etc. 

Acts x. 1. — "There was a certain man in 
Caesarea called Cornelius, a centurion of 
the band called the Italian band,'' 
etc 716 



SERMON XV. 

Preached 1849. 

THE WORD AND THE WORLD. 

A.OT8 xix. 1, 2.— "And it came to pass, that 
while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul hav- 
ing passed through the upper coasts 
came to Ephesus ; and finding certain 
disciples, he said unto them, Have ye 
received the Holy Ghost since ye be- 
lieved? And they said unto him, We 
have not so much as heard whether 
there be any Holy Ghost." etc 724 



SERMON XVI. 

Preached June 24, 184!» 

SOLOMON'S RESTORATION. » 

Neh. xiii. 26.—" Did not Solomon king of 
Israel sin by these things? yet among 
many nations was there no king like him, 
who was beloved of his God ". . Page 735 



SERMON XVII. 

Preached June 1, 1851. 

JOSEPH'S FORGIVENESS OF HIS 
BRETHREN. 

Gen. 1. 15-21.— "And when Joseph's breth- 
ren saw that their father was dead, they 
said, Joseph will peradveuture hate us, 
and will certainly requite us all the evil 
which we did unto him. And they sent 
a messenger unto Joseph, saying. Thy 
father did command before he died, say- 
ing. So shall ye say unto Joseph, For- 
give, I pray thee now, the trespass of 
thy brethren, and their sin; for they 
did unto thee evil : and now, we pray 
thee, forgive the trespass of the serv- 
ants of the God of thy father. And JO' 
seph wept when they spake unto hira. 
And his brethren also went and fell 
down before his face; and they said, 
Behold, we be thy servants. And Jo- 
seph said unto them. Fear not : for am 
I in the place of God ? But as for you, 
ye thought evil against me; but God 
meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as 
it is this day, to save much people alive. 
Now therefore fear ye not: I will nour- 
ish you, and your little ones. And he 
comforted them, and spake kindly unto 
them " o o .... 745 



SERMON XVIII. 

Preached November 15. 1849. 

A THANKSGIVING DAY AFTER 
CHOLERA. 

John v. 14, 15.— "Afterward Jesus findeth 
him in the temple, aud said unto him, 
Behold, thcu art made whole: sin no 
more, lest a worse thing come unto thee. 
The man departed, and told the Jews 
that it was Jesus, which had made him 
whole" 753 



SERMON XIX. 

Preached August 8, 1859. 

CHRISTIAN FRIENDSHIP. 

Mal. iii. 16.— "Then they that feared the 
Lord spake often one to another: and 
the Lord hearkened, aud heard it, and 
a book of remembrance was written be- 
fore him for them that feared the Lord, 
and that thought upon his name " ^ , 76| 



XX 



Conte7tts. 



SERMOK X<. 

Preached February 2, 1S51. 

RECONCILIATION BY CHRIST. 

CoLoss. i. 21. — "And you, that were some- 
time alienated and enemies in your mind 
by wicked works, yet now hath he rec- 
onciled " Page 766 

SERMON XXI. 

Preached March 13, 1853. 

THE PRE-EMINENCE OF CHARITY. 

1 Peter iv. 8. — "And above all things 
have fervent charity among yourselves : 
for charity shall cover the multitude of 
sins" 776 



SERMON XXII. 

Preached January 8, 1849. 

THE UNJUST STEWARD. 

LiTKE xvi. 8, 9. — "And the lord commend- 
ed the unjust steward because he had 
done wisely : for the children of this 
world are in their generation wiser than 
the children of light. And I say unto 
you, Make to yourselves friends of the 
mammon of unrighteousness ; that, 
when ye fail, they may receive you into 
everlasting habitations " 787 



SERMON XXIII. 

Preached February 16, 1851. 

THE ORPHANAGE OF MOSES. 

A SERMON PREACHED ON BEHALF OF THP 
ORPHAN SOCIETY. 

ExoT). ii. 6-9. — "And when she had opened 
it, she saw the child: and, behold, the 
babe wept. And she had compassion 
on him, and said, This is one of the 
Hebrews' children. Then said his sis- 
ter to Phar.ioh's daughter, Shall I go 
and call to thee a nurse of the Hebrew 
women, that she may nurse the child 
for thee ? And Pharaoh's daughter said 
to her, Go. And the maid went and 
called the child's mother. And Pha- 
raoh's daughter said unto her. Take 
this child away, and nurse it for me, 
and I will give thee thy wages. And 
the woman took the child, and nursed 
»f 794 



SERMON XXIV. 

Prjached December, 1^47. 

CHRISTIANITY AND HINDOOISM. 

AN APVKNT I.EOTDBE. 

Dect. vi. 4, 6.—" Hear, O Israel : The Lord 
our God is one Lord : And thou shalt 



! love the Lord thy God with all thin« 
heart, and with all thy soul, and with 
all thy might" Page 801 



SERMON XXV. 

Preached January 13, 1850. 

REST. 

Matt. xi. 28, 29. — "Come unto me, all ye 
that labor and are heavy laden, and I 
will give you rest. Take my yoke upon 
you, and learn of me; for I am "meek 
and lowly in heart: and ye shall find 
rest unto your souls " 806 



SERMON XXVI. 
THE HUMANE SOCIETY. 

A SERMON PREACHED ON ITS BEHALF. 

Mark v. 35^3. — "While he yet spake, 
there came from the ruler of the syna- 
gogue's house certain which said, Thy 
daughter is dead ; why troublest thou 
the Master any further? As soon as 
Jesus heard the word that was spoken, 
he saith uu-to the ruler of the syna- 
gogue. Be not afraid, only believe. And 
he suffered no man to follow him, save 
Peter, and James, and John the brother 
of James. And he cometh to the house 
of the ruler of the synagogue, and seeth 
the tumult, and them' that wept and 
wailed greatly. And when he was come 
in, he saith unto them. Why make ye 
this ado, and weep? the damsel is not 
dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed 
him to scorn. But when he had put 
them all out, he taketh the father and 
mother of the damsel, and them that 
were with him, and entereth in where 
the damsel was lying. And he took the 
damsel by the hand, and said unto her, 
Talitha cumi; which is, being inter- 
preted, Damsel, (I say unto thee,) arise. 
And straightway the damsel arose, and 
walked ; for she was of the age of twelve 
years. And they were astonished with 
a great astonishment. And he charged 
them straitly that no man should know 
it; and commanded that something 
should be given her to eat " 813 



SERMON XXVII. 

Preached December 1, 1850. 

THREE TIMES IN A NATION'S HIS- 
TORY. 

T UKE xix. 41^i4.— "And when he was coma 
near, he beheld the city, and wept over 
it, saying. If thou hadst known, even 
thou, at least in this thy day, the things 
which belong unto thy peace ! but now 
they are hid from thine eyes. For the 
days shall come upon thee, that thine 
enemies shall cast a trench about thee, 
and compass thee round, and keep thee 
in on every side, and shall lay thee even 



Contents, 



XXI 



with the ground, and thy children within 
thee ; and they shall not leave in thee 
one stone npon another; because thou 
knewest not the time of thy visita- 
tion " Page 818 



SERMON xxnn. 

Preached December 8, 1850. 

INSPIRATION. 

Rom. XV. 1^.—" We then that are strong 
ought to bear the infirmities of the 
weak, and not to please ourselves. Let 
every one of us please his neighbor for 
bis good to edification. For even Christ 
pleased not himself; but, as it is writ- 



ten, The reproaches of them that re- 
proached thee fell on me. For whatso- 
ever things were written aforetime were 
written for our learning, that we through 
patience and comfort of the Scriptures 
might have hope " Page 825 



SERMON XXIX. 

Preached Good Friday, 1851 

THE LAST UTTERANCES OF CHRIST 

John xix. 30. — "When Jesus therefore 
had received the vinegar, he said. It is 
finished : and he bowed his head, and 
gave up the ghost" §32 



SERMONS 



lixsi Qtxm. 



GOD'S REYELATIOK OF HEAYEK 

**Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of 
man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God 
hath revealed them unto us hy his Spirit. " — 1 Cor. ii. 9, 10. 

The preaching of the Apostle Paul was rejected by num- 
bers in the cultivated town of Corinth. It was not wise 
enough, nor eloquent enough : — nor was it sustained by mir- 
acles. The man of taste found it barbarous : the Jew miss- 
ed the signs and wonders which he looked for in a new dis- 
pensation : and the rhetorician missed the convincing argu- 
ments of the schools. To all which the Apostle was content 
to reply, that his judges were incompetent to try the ques- 
tion. The princes of this world might judge in a matter of 
politics : the leaders in the world of literature were qualified 
to pronounce on a point of taste : the counsellors of this 
world to weigh an amount of evidence. But in matter? 
spiritual, they were as unfit to judge, as a man without ea 
is to decide respecting harmony ; or a man judging alone bj 
sensation, to supersede the higher truth of science by an ap- 
peal to his own estimate of appearances. The world, to 
sense, seems stationary. To the eye of reason it moves 
with lightning speed, and the cultivation of reason alone can 
qualify for an opinion on the matter. The judgment of the 
(Senses is worth nothing in such matters. For every kind of 
truth a special capacity or preparation is indispensable. 

For a revelation of spiritual facts two things are needed : 
— First, a Divine Truth ; next, a spirit which can receive it. 

Therefore the Apostle's whole defense resolved itself into 
this : The natural man receiveth not the things which are of 



24 God's Revelation of Heaven. 

the Spirit of God. The world by wisdora knew not God. 
And his vindication of his teaching was : These Revealed 
Truths can not be seen by the eye, heard by the ear, nor 
guessed by the heart ; they are visible, audible, imaginable, 
only to the spirit. By the spiritually prepared, they are 
recognized as beautiful, though they be folly to all the world 
besides, as his Master had said before him, " Wisdom is justi- 
fied by her children." In whatever type of life she might be 
exhibited, w^hether in the austere Man of the Desert, or in 
the higher type of the social life of Christ, the Children of 
Wisdom recognized her lineaments, justified and loved her — 
She was felt by them. 

Two things are contained in this verse : — 

I. The inability ol the lower parts of human nature — the 
natural man — to apprehend the higher truths. 

II. The nature and laws of Revelation. 

I. By the natural man is meant the lower faculties ot man; 
and it is said of these that they can not discover spiritual 
truth. 

1. Eternal truth is not perceived through sensation. " Eye 
hath not seen the things which God hath prepared for them 
that love Him." 

There is a life of mere sensation. The degree of its enjoy- 
ment depends upon fineness of organization. The pleasures 
of sense arise from the vibration of a nerve, or the thrilling 
of a muscle — nothing higher. 

The highest pleasure of sensation comes through the eye. 
She ranks above all the rest of the senses in dignity. He 
wliose eye is so refined by discipline that he can repose with 
pleasure upon the serene outline of beautiful form, has reach- 
ed the purest of the sensational raptures. 

Now, the Corinthians could appreciate this. Theirs was 
the land of beauty. They read the Apostle's letter, sur- 
rounded by the purest conceptions of Art. In the orders of 
architecture, the most richly graceful of all columnar forms 
receives its name from Corinth. And yet it was to these 
men, living in the very midst of the chastely beautiful, upon 
whom the Apostle emphatically urged — ''''Eye hath not seen 
the thinsrs which God hath prepared for them that love 
Him." 

Let us not depreciate what God has given. Tliere is a 
rapture in gazing on this wondrous world. There is a joy 
in contemplating the manifold forms in which the All Beau- 
ful has concealed His essence — the Living Garment in which 
the Invisible has robed His mysterious loveliness. In every 



God's Revelation of Heaven. 25 

aspect of Nature there is joy ; whether it be the purity of 
virgin .morning, or the sombre gray of a day of clouds, or the 
solemn pomp and majesty of night ; whether it be the chaste 
, lines of the crystal, or the waving outline of distant hills, 
tremulously visible through dim vapors ; the minute petals 
of the fringed daisy, or the overhanging form of mysterious 
forests. It is a pure delight to see. 

But all this is bounded. The eye can only reach the finite 
Beautiful. It does not scan " the King in his beauty, nor 
the land that is very far off." The Kingdom, but not the 
King — something measured by inches, yards, and miles — not 
the land which is very far off in the Infinite. 

Again, it is perishable beauty — a sight to sadden rather 
than delight. Even while you gaze, and feel how fair it is, 
joy mingles with melancholy, from a consciousness that it 
all is fading : — it is the transient — not the Eternal Loveliness 
for which our spirits pant. 

Therefore, when He came into this world, who was the 
Truth and the Life, in the body which God had prepared for 
Him, He came not in the glory of form : He was " a root out 
of a dry ground : He had no form nor comeliness ;" when 
they saw Him, " there was no beauty that they should desire 
Him." The eye did not behold, even in Christ, the things 
which God had prepared. 

Now observe, this is an Eternal Truth ; true at all times — 
true now and forever. In the quotation of this verse, a false 
impression is often evident. It is quoted as if the Apostle 
by " the things prepared " meant heaven, and the glories of 
a world which is to be visible hereafter, but is at present un- 
seen. This is manifestly alien from his purpose. The world 
of which he speaks is not a future, but a present revelation. 
God hath revealed it. He speaks not of something to be 
manifested hereafter, but of something already shown, only 
not to eye nor ear. The distinction lies between a kingdom 
which is appreciable by the senses, and another whose facts 
and truths are seen and heard only by the spirit. Never yet 
hath the eye seen the Truths of God — but then never shall 
it see them. In heaven this shall be as true as now. Shape 
and color give them not. God will never be visible — nor 
will His blessedness. He has no form. The pure in heart 
will see Him, but never with the eye ; only in the same way, 
but in a different degree, that they see Him now. In the an- 
ticipated vision of the Eternal, what do you expect to see ? 
A shape ? Hues ? You will never behold God. Eye hath 
not seen, and never shall see in finite form, the Infinite One, 
uor the Infinite of feelino; or of Truth. 



26 God's Revelation of Heaven, 

Again — no scientific analysis can discover the truths of 
God. Science can not give a Revelation. Science proceeds 
upon observation. It submits every thing to the experience 
of the senses. Its law, expounded by its great lawgiver, is,, 
that if you would ascertain its truth you must see, feel, taste. 
Experiment is the test of truth. Now, you can not, by 
searching, find out the Almighty to perfection, nor a single 
one of the blessed Truths He has to communicate. 

Men have tried to demonstrate Eternal Life from an ex 
amination of the structure of the body. One fancies he has 
discovered the seat of life in the pineal gland — another in 
the convolution of a nerve — and thence each infers the con 
tinuance of the mystic principle supposed to be discovered 
there. But a third comes, and sees in it all nothing really 
immaterial: organization, cerebration, but not Thought or 
Mind separable from these ; nothing that must necessarily 
subsist after the organism has been destroyed. 

Men have supposed they discovered the law of Deity writ- 
ten on the anatomical phenomena of disease. They have ex- 
hibited the brain inflamed by intoxication, and the structure 
obliterated by excess. They have shown in the disordered 
frame the inevitable penalty of transgression. But if a man, 
startled by all this, gives up this sin, has he from this selfish 
prudence learned the law of Duty ? The penalties of 
wrong-doing, doubtless : but not the sanction of Right and 
Wrong written on the conscience, of which penalties are only 
the enforcements. He has indisputable evidence that it is 
expedient not to commit excesses ; but you can not manu- 
facture a conscience out of expediency : the voice of con- 
science says not, It is better not do so, but " Thou shalt 
not." 

No : it is in vain that we ransack the world for probable 
evidences of God and hypotheses of his existence. It is idle 
to look into the materialism of man for the Revelation of his 
immortality ; or to examine the morbid anatomy of the body 
to find the rule of Right. If a man go to the eternal world 
with convictions of Eternity, the Resurrection, God, already 
in his spirit, he will find abundant corroborations of that 
which he already believes. But if God's existence be not 
thrilling every fibre of his heart, if the Immortal be not al- 
ready in him as the proof of the Resurrection, if the law of 
Duty be not stamped upon his soul as an Eternal Truth, un- 
questionable, a thing that must be obeyed, quite separately 
from all considerations of punishment or impunity, science 
Avill never reveal those — observation pries in vain — the phy- 
sician comes away from the laboratory an infidel. Eye hath 



God' s Revelation of Heaven. 27 

not seen the truths which are clear enough to Love and to 
the Spirit. 

2. Eternal truth is not reached by hearsay — "Ear hath 
not heard the things which God hath prepared for them that 
love Him." 

No revelation can be adequately given by the address of 
man to man, whether by writing or orally, even if he be put 
in possession of the Truth itself. For all such revelation 
must be made through words : and words are but counters 
— the coins of intellectual exchange. There is as little re- 
semblance between the silver coin and the bread it pur- 
chases, as between the word and the thing it stands for. 
Looking at the coin, the form of the loaf does not suggest 
itself Listening to the word, you do not perceive the idea 
for which it stands, unless you are already in possession of 
it. Speak of ice to an inhabitant of the torrid zone, the 
word does not give him an idea, or if it does, it must be a 
false one. Talk of blueness to one who can not distinguish 
colors, what can your most eloquent description present to 
him resembling the truth of your sensation ? Similarly in 
matters spiritual, no verbal revelation can give a single sim- 
ple idea. For instance, what means justice to the unjust — 
or purity to the man whose heart is steeped in licentious- 
ness ? What does infinitude mean to a being who has never 
stirred from infancy beyond a cell, never seen the sky, or the 
sea, or any of those occasions of thought which, leaving 
vagueness on the mind, suggest the idea of the illimitable ? 
It means, explain it as you will, nothing to him but a room ; 
vastly larger than his own, but still a room, terminated by a 
wall. Talk of God to a thousand ears, each has his own dif- 
ferent conception. Each man in this congregation has a 
God before him at this moment, who is, according to his 
own attainment in goodness, more or less limited and im- 
perfect. The sensual man hears of God, and understands 
one thing. The pure man hears, and conceives another 
thing. Wliether you speak in metaphysical or metaphorical 
language, in the purest words of inspiration, or the grossest 
images of materialism, the conceptions conveyed by the same 
word are essentially difierent, according to the soul which 
receives them. 

So that apostles themselves, and prophets, speaking to the 
ear, can not reveal truth to the soul — no, not if God Himself 
were to touch their lips with fire. A verbal revelation ia 
only a revelation to the ear. 

Now see what a hearsay religion is. There are men who 
believe on authority. Their minister believes all this Chris* 



2 8 God V Revelation of Heaven. 

tianity true : therefore so do they- lie calls this doctrine es- 
sential : they echo it. Some thousands of years ago, men 
communed with God : they have heard this and are content 
it should be so. They have heard with the hearing of the 
ear, that God is love — that the ways of holiness are ways 
of pleasantness, and all her paths peace. But a hearsay be- 
lief saves not. The Corinthian philosophers heard Paul, the 
Pharisees heard Christ. How much did the ear convey ? 
To thousands exactly nothing. He alone believes truth who 
feels it. He alone has a religion whose soul knows by expe- 
rience that to serve God and know Him is the richest treas- 
ure. And unless Truth come to you, not in word only, but 
in power besides — authoritative because true, not true because 
authoritative — there has been no real revelation made to you 
from God. 

3. Truth is not discoverable by the heart — " neither have 
entered into the heart of man the things which God hath 
prepared for them that love Him." 

The heart — two things we refer to this source : the power 
of imagining, and the power of loving. 

Imagination is distinct from the mere dry faculty of rea- 
soning. Imagination is creative — it is an immediate intui- 
tion ; not a logical analysis — we call it popularly a kind of 
inspiration. Now imagination is a power of the heart. 
Great thous^hts oris^inate from a lars^e heart : a man must 
have a heart, or he never could create. 

It is a grand thing, when in the stillness of the soul, 
thought bursts into flame, and the intuitive vision comes like 
an inspiration ; when breathing thoughts clothe themselves 
in burning words, winged as it were with lightning ; or when 
a great law of the universe reveals itself to the mind of 
Genius, and where all was darkness, his single word bids 
Light be, and all is order Avhere chaos and confusion were be- 
fore. Or when the truths of human nature shape themselves 
forth in the creative fancies of one like the myriad-minded 
poet, and you recognize the rare power of heart which sym- 
pathizes with, and can reproduce all that is found in man. 

But all this is nothing more than what the material man 
can achieve. The most ethereal creations of fantastic fancy 
were shaped by a mind that could read the life of Christ, 
and then blaspheme the Adorable. The truest utterances, 
and some of the deepest ever spoken, revealing the unrest 
and the agony that lie hid in the heart of man, came from 
one whose life was from first to last selfish. The highest 
astronomer of this age, before whose clear eye Creation lay 
revealed in all its perfect order, was one whose spirit refused 



God's Revelation of Heaven, 29 

to recognize the Cause of causes. The mighty heart of 
Geoius had failed to reach the things which God imparts to 
a humble spirit. 

There is more in the heart of man — it has the power of 
affection. The highest moment known on earth by the 
merely natural, is that in which the mysterious union of 
heart with heart is felt. Call it fiiendship— love — what you 
will, that mystic blending of two souls in one, when self is 
lost and found again in the being of another, when, as it 
were, moving about in the darkness and loneliness of exist- 
ence, we suddenly come in contact with something, and we 
find that spirit has touched spirit. This is the purest, 
serenest ecstasy of the merely human — more blessed than 
any sight that can be presented to the eye, or any sound 
that can be given to the ear; more sublime than the sub- 
limest dream ever conceived by genius in its most gifted 
hour, when the freest way was given to the shaping spirit of 
imagination. 

This has entered into the heart of man, yet this is of the 
lower still. It attains not to the things prepared by God, 
it dimly shadows them. Human love is but the faint type 
of that surpassing blessedness which belongs to those who 
love God. 

II. We pass, therefore, to the nature and laws of Revela- 
tion. 

First, Revelation is made by a Spirit to a spirit — " God 
hath revealed them to us by His Spirit." Christ is the voice 
of God without the man — the Spirit is the voice of God with- 
in the man. The highest revelation is not made by Christ, 
but comes directly from the universal Mind to our minds. 
Therefore, Christ said Himself, " He, the Spirit, shall take of 
mine and shall show it unto you." And therefore it is writ 
ten here — "The Spirit searches all things, yea, the deep 
things of God." 

Now the Spirit of God lies touching, as it were, the soul 
of man — ever around and near. On the outside of earth 
man stands with the boundless heaven above him : nothing 
'between him and space — space around him and above him 
— the confines of the sky touching him. So is the spirit of 
man to the Spirit of the Ever Near. They mingle. In every 
man this is true. The spiritual in him, by which he might 
become a recipient of God, may be dulled, deadened by 2 
life of sense, but in this world never lost. All men are not 
spiritual men, but all have s])iritual sensibilities which might 
awake. All that is wanted is to become conscious of the 



30 God^s Revelation of Heaven. 

nearness of God. God has placed men here to feel aftei 
Him if haply they may find Him, albeit He he not far from 
any one of them. Our souls float in the immeasurable ocean 
of Spirit. God lies around us : at any moment we might be 
conscious of the contact. 

The condition upon which this self-revelation of the Spirit 
is made to man is love. These things are "prepared for 
them that love Him," or, which is the same thing, revealed 
to those who have the mind of Christ. 

Let us look into this word love. Love to man may mean 
several things. It may mean love to his person, which is 
very diflferent from himself, or it may mean simply pity. 
Love to God can only mean one thing: God is a Character. 
To love God is to love His character. For instance — God 
is Purity. And to be pure in thought and look ; to turn 
away from unhallowed books and conversation, to abhor the 
moment in which we have not been pure, is to love God. 

God is love — and to love men till private attachments 
have expanded into a philanthropy which embraces all — at 
last even the evil and enemies, with compassion — that is to 
love God. God is truth. To be true, to hate every form 
of falsehood, to live a brave, true, real life, that is to love 
God. God is Infinite ; and to love the boundless, reaching 
on from grace to grace, adding charity to faith, and rising 
upward ever to see the Ideal still above us, and to die with 
it unattained, aiming insatiably to be perfect even as the 
Father is perfect, that is love to God. 

This love is manifested in obedience; love is the life of 
which obedience is the form. "He that hath my command- 
ments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me He 

that loveth me not keepeth not my sayings." Now here 
can be no mistake. Nothing can be love to God which does 
not shape itself into obedience. We remember the anecdote 
of the Roman commander who forbade an engagement with 
the enemy, and the first transgressor against whose prohibi- 
tion was his own son. He accepted the challenge of the 
leader of the other host, met, slew, spoiled him, and then in tri- 
umphant feeling carried the spoils to his father's tent. But 
ihe Roman father refused to recognize the instinct which 
prompted this as deserving of the name of love ; disobedience 
contradicted it, and deserved death : — weak sentiment, what 
was it worth ? 

So with God : strong feelings, warm expressions, varied in- 
ternal experience co-existing with disobedience, God counts 
not as love. Mere weak feeling may not usurp that sac7-ed 
name. 



Gocf s Revelation of Heaven, 31 

To this love, adoring and obedient, God reveals His truth 
—for such as love it is prepared : or rather, by the well- 
known Hebrew inversion, such are prepared for it. Love is 
the condition without which revelation does not take place. 
As in the natural, so in the spiritual world : By compliance 
with the laws of the universe, we put ourselves in possession 
of its blessings. Obey the laws of health, and you obtain 
health : temperance, sufficiency of light and air, and exercise, 
these are the conditions of health. Arm yourselves with the 
laws of nature, and you may call down the lightning from the 
sky; surround yourself with glass, and the lightning may 
play innocuously a few inches from you ; it can not touch 
you ; you may defy it ; you have obeyed the conditions of 
nature, and nature is on your side against it. 

In the same way, there are conditions in the world of 
Spirit, by compliance with which God's Spirit comes into 
the soul with all its revelations, as surely as lightning from 
the sky, and as invariably : — such conditions as these : " The 
secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him." " No man 
hath seen God at any time." " If we love one another, God 
dwelleth in us." " With this man will I dwell, even with him 
that is of a meek and contrite spirit." " If any man will do 
His will, he shall know of the doctrine " — reverence, love, 
meekness, contrition, obedience — these conditions having 
taken place, God enters into the soul, whispers His secret, be- 
comes visible, imparts knowledge and conviction. 

Now these laws are universal and invariable ; they are 
subject to no caprice. There is no favorite child of nature 
who may hold the fire-ball in the hollow of his hand and 
trifle with it without being burnt ; — there is no selected 
child of grace who can live an irregular life without unrest ; 
or be proud, and at the same time have peace ; or indolent, 
and receive fresh inspiration ; or remain unloving and cold, 
and yet see and hear and feel the things which God bath 
prepared for them that love Him. 

Therefore the apostle preached the Cross to men who felt, 
and to men who felt not, the Revelation contained in it. 
The Cross is humbleness, love, self-surrender — these the 
apostle preached. To conquer the world by loving it — to 
be blest by ceasing the pursuit of happiness, and sacrificing 
life instead of finding it — to make a hard lot easy by submit- 
ting to it : this was his divine philosophy of life. And the 
princes of this world, amidst scoffs and laughter, replied. Is 
that all ? Nothing to dazzle — nothing to captivate. But 
the disciples of the inward life recognized the Divine Truth 
«vhich this doctrine of the Cross contained. The humble of 



32 God^s Revelation of Heaven, 

heart and the loving felt that in this lay the mystery of life:, 
of themselves, and of God, all revealed and plain. It wag 
God's own wisdom, felt by those who had the mind of 
Christ. 

The application of all this is very easy: Love God, and 
He will dwell with you. Obey God, and He will reveal the 
truths of His deepest teaching to your soul, ^oi perhaps : 
— as surely as the laws of the spiritual world are irreversi- 
ble, are these things prepared for obedient love. An inspira- 
tion as true, as real, and as certain as that which ever prophet 
or apostle reached, is yours, if you will have it so. 

And if obedience were entire and love were perfect, then 
would the revelation of the Spirit to the soul of man be per- 
fect too. There would be trust expelling care, and enabling 
a man to repose ; there would be a love which would cast 
out fear; there would be a sympathy with the mighty All 
of God. Selfishness would pass, isolation would be felt no 
longer ; the tide of the universal and eternal Life would 
come with mighty pulsations throbbing through the soul. 
To such a man it would not matter where he was, nor what : 
to live or die would be alike. If he lived, he would live 
unto the Lord ; if he died, he would die to the Lord. The 
bed of down surrounded by friends, or the martyr's stake 
girt round with curses — what matter which? Stephen, 
dragged, hurried, driven to death, felt the glory of God 
streaming on his face : w^hen the shades of faiTitness were 
gathering round his eyes, and the world was fading away 
into indistinctness, " the things prepared " were given him. 
His spirit saw what " eye had never seen." The later martyr 
bathes his fingers in the flames, and while the flesh shrivels 
and the bones are cindered, says, in unfeigned sincerity, that 
he is lying on a bed of roses. It would matter little what 
he was — the ruler of a kingdom, or a tailor grimed with the 
smoke and dust of a workshop. To a soul filled with God, 
the difference between these two is inappreciable — as if, from 
a distant star, you were to look down upon a palace and a 
hovel, both dwindled into distance, and were to smile at the 
thought of calling one large and the other small. 

No matter to such a man what he saw or what he heard ; 
for every sight would be resplendent with beauty, and every 
sound would echo harmony; things common would become 
transfigured, as when the ecstatic state of the inward soul 
reflected a radiant cloud from the form of Christ. The 
human would become divine, Life — even the meanest — 
noble. In the hne of every violet there would be a glimpse 
of Divine affection, and a dream of Heaven. The forest 



Parable of the Sower, 33 

would blaze with Deity, as it did to the eye of Moses. The 
creations of genius would breathe less of earth and more of 
Heaven. Human love itself would burn with a clearer and 
ijitenser flame, rising from the altar of self-sacrifice. 

These are " the things which God hath prepared for them 
that love Him." Compared with these, what are loveliness 
— the eloquent utterances of man — the conceptions of the 
heart of Genius? What are they all to the serene stillness 
of a spirit lost in love : the full deep rapture of a soul int* 
which the Spirit of God is pouring itself in a mighty tide of 
Revelation ? 



n. 
PARABLE OF THE SOWER. 

"The same day went Jesus out of the house, and sat by the sea-side. 
And great multitudes were gathered together unto him, so that he went into 
a ship, and sat ; and the whole multitude stood on the shore. And he spake 
many things unto them in parables, saying. Behold, a sower went forth to sow ; 
and when he soAved, some seeds fell by the way-side, and the fowls came and 
devom-ed them up : Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much 
earth : and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth : 
And when the sun was up, they were scorched ; and because they had no 
root, they withered away. And some fell among thorns ; and the thorns 
sprung up, and choked them : But others fell into good ground, and brought 
forth fruit, some a hundred-fold, some sixty-fold, some thirty-fold. Who 
hath ears to hear, let him hear." — Matt. xiii. 1-9. 

Before the reception of the Lord's Supper on Sunday 
next, I have been anxious to address you once more, my 
young friends, in order to carry on the thoughts, and, if pos- 
sible, deepen the impressions of Tuesday last. During the 
last few weeks you have been subjected to much that is 
exciting ; and in proportion to the advantage is the danger 
of that excitement. A great part of the value of the rite of 
Confirmation consists in its being a season of excitement or 
impression. The value of excitement is, that it breaks up 
the old mechanical life which has become routine. It stirs 
the stagnancy of our existence, and causes the stream of life 
to flow more fresh and clear. The danger of excitement is 
the probability of reaction. The heart, like the body and 
the mind, can not be long exposed to extreme tension with- 
out giving way afterwards. Strong impressions are suc- 
ceeded by corresponding listlessness. Your work, to which 
ou have so long looked forward, is done. The profession 
as been made, and now left suddenly, as it were, with noth- 



h; 



34 Parable of the Sozver. 

ing before you, and apparently no answer to the question, 
What are we to do now ? Insensibly you will feel that all ia 
over, and the void within your hearts will be inevitably 
filled, unless there be great vigilance, by a very differei^^t 
class of excitements. This danger will be incurred most by 
precisely those who felt most deeply the services of the past 
week. 

The parable I have selected dwells upon such a class of 
dangers. 

No one who felt, or even thought, could view the scene ol 
Tuesday last without emotion, Six or seven hundred young 
persons solemnly pledged themselves to renounce evil in 
themselves and in the world, and to become disciples of the 
Cross. The very color of their garments, typical of purity, 
seemed to suggest the hope and the expectation that the 
day might come when they shall be found clothed with that 
inward righteousness of which their dress was but a symbol, 
when " they shall walk with Him in white, for they are wor- 
thy." As yet fresh in feeling, as yet untainted by open sin, 
who could see them without hoping that ? 

My young friends, experience forces us to correct that 
sanguine anticipation. Of the seven hundred who were 
earnest then, it were an appalling question to ask how many 
will have retained their earnestness six months hence, and 
how much of all that which seemed so real will be recognized 
as pure, true gold at the last Great Day. Soon some will 
have lost their innocence, and some will have become frivolous 
and artificial, and the world will have got its cold, deaden- 
ing hand on some. Who shall dare to guess in how many 
the best raised hopes will be utterly disappointed ? 

Now the question which presents itself is. How comes so 
much promise to end in failure? And to this the parable of 
the sower returns a reply. 

Three causes are conceivable : It mght be the will, or, if 
you venture so to call it, the fault of Him who gave the 
truth ; or it might be some inherent impotency in the truth 
itself; or, lastly, the fault might lie solely in the soil of the 
heart. 

This parable assures us that the fault does not lie in God, 
the sower. God does not predestinate men to fail. That is 
strikingly told in the history of Judas — " From a ministry 
dnd apostleship Judas fell, that he might go to his own 
place." The ministry and apostleship were that to which 
God had destined him. To work out that was the destiny 
appointed to him, as truly as to any of the other apostles. 
He was called, elected to that. But when he refused to ex 



Parable of the Sower. 35 

ecute that mission, the very circumstances which, by God's 
decree, were leading him to blessedness, hurried him to ruin. 
Circumstances prepared by Eternal Love, became the desti 
ny which conducted him to everlasting doom. He was a 
predestined man — crushed by his fate. But he went to hia 
" own place." He had shaped his own destiny. So the ship 
is wrecked by the winds and waves — hurried to its fate. 
But the winds and waves were in truth its best friends, 
Rightly guided, it would have made use of them to reach 
the port ; wrongly steered, they became the destiny which 
drove it on the rocks. Failure — the wreck of life — is not to 
be impiously traced to the will of God. " God will have all 
men to be saved, and come to a knowledge of the truth." 
God willeth not the death of a sinner. 

Nor, again, can we find the cause in any impotency of 
truth : — an impotency, doubtless, there is somewhere. The 
old thinkers accounted for it by the depravity of Matter. 
God can do any thing, they said. Being good, God would 
do all good. If he do not, it is because of the materials He 
has to deal with. Matter thwarts Him : Spirit is pure, but 
Matter is essentially evil and unspiritual: the body is cor- 
rupt. Against this doctrine St. Paul argues in the text, 
" For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being bur- 
dened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed 
upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life." — 
2 Cor. V. 4. 

The true account is this : God has created in man a will 
which has become a cause. "God can do any thing?" I 
know not that. God can not deny himself; God can not do 
wrong; God can not create a number less than one ; God 
can not make a contradiction true. It is a contradiction to 
let man be free, and force him to do right. God has per- 
formed this marvel, of creating a being with free-will, inde- 
pendent, so to speak, of Himself — a real cause in His uni- 
verse. To say that He has created such a one, is to say that 
He has given him the power to fail. Without free-will there 
could be no human goodness. It is wise, therefore, and good 
in God, to give birth to free-will. But once acknowledge 
free-will in man, and the origin of evil does not lie in God. 

And this leads us to the remaining cause of failure which 
is conceivable. In our own free-will — in the grand and fear- 
ful power we have to ruin ourselves — lies the real and only 
religious solution of the mystery. In the soil of the heart is 
found all the nutrinient of spiritual life, and all the nutriment 
of the weeds and poisons which destroy spiritual life. And 
it is this which makes Christian character, when complete, a 



36 Parable of the Sower, 

thing so inestimably precious. There are things preciouSj 
not from the materials of which they are made, but from the 
risk and difficulty of bringing them to perfection. The 
speculum of the largest telescope foils the optician's skill m 
casting. Too much or too little he^t — the interposition of a 
grain of sand, a slight alteration in the temperature of the 
weather, and all goes to pieces — it must be recast. Therefop*e, 
when successfully finished, it is a matter for almost the c|)n- 
gratulation of a country. Rarer, and more difficult still 
than the costliest part of the most delicate of instruments, 
is the completion of Christian character. Only let there 
come the heat of persecution, or the cold of human deser- 
tion, a little of the world's dust, and the rare and costly 
thing is cracked, and becomes a failure. 

In this parable are given to us the causes of failure, and 
the requirements which are necessary in order to enable im- 
pressions to become permanent. 

I. The causes of failure. 

1. The first of these is want of spiritual perception. Some 
of the seed fell by the way-side. There are persons whose 
religion is all outside ; it never penetrates beyond the intel- 
lect. Duty is recognized in word, not felt. They are reg- 
ular at church, understand the Catechism and Articles, con- 
sider the Church a most venerable institution, have a respect 
for religion, but it never stirs the deeps of their being. 
They feel nothing in it beyond a safeguard for the decencies 
and respectabilities of social life ; valuable, as parliaments 
and magistrates are valuable, but by no laeans the one aw' 
ful question which fills the soul with fearful grandeur. 

Truth of life is subject to failure in such hearts in two 
ways : — By being trodden down ; wheat dropped by a harvest- 
cart upon a road lies outside. There comes a passenger's 
foot, and crushes some of it ; then wheels come by — the 
wheel of traffic and the wheel of pleasure — crushing it grain 
by grain. It is " trodden down." 

The fate of religion is easily understood from the parallel 
fate of a single sermon. Scarcely has its last tone vibrated 
on the ear, when a fresh impression is given by the music 
which dismisses the congregation. That is succeeded by an- 
other impression, as your friend puts his arm in yours and 
talks of some other matter, irrelevant, obliterating any slight 
seriousness which the sermon produced. Another, and an- 
other, and another — and the word is trodden down. Ob- 
serve, there is nothing wrong in these impressions. The 
farmer's cart wliich crushes the grain by the way-side is roll* 



Parable of the Sower. 37 

ing by on rightful business, and the stage and the pedestrian 
are in their place; simply the seed is not. It is not the 
wrongness of the impressions which treads religion down, 
but only this, that outside religion yields in turn to other 
ijutside impressions which are stronger. 

Again , conceptions of religious life, which are only concep- 
tions ou.tward, having no lodgment in the heart, disappear. 
-Fowls of the air came and devoured the seed. Have you 
ever seen grain scattered on the road? The sparrow from 
the housetop, and the chickens from the barn rush in, and 
within a minute after it has been scattered not the shadow 
of a grain is left. This is the picture, not of thought crushed 
by degrees, but of thought dissipated, and no man can tell 
when or how it went. Swiftly do these winged thoughts 
come, when we pray, or read, or listen ; in our inattentive, 
sauntering, way-side hours : and before we can be upon our 
guard, the very trace of holier purposes has disappeared. In 
our purest moods, when we kneel to pray, or gather round 
the altar, down into the very Holy of holies sweep these 
foul birds of the air, villain fancies, demon thoughts. The 
germ of life, the small seed of impression, is gone — where, 
you know not. But it is gone. Inattentiveness of spirit, 
produced by want of spiritual interest, is the first cause of 
disappointment. 

2. A second cause of failure is want of depth in character. 
Some fell on stony ground. Stony ground means often the 
soil Avith which many loose stones are intermixed ; but that 
is not the stony ground meant here : this stony ground is the 
thin layer of earth upon a bed of rock. Shallow soil is like 
superficial character. You meet with such persons in life. 
There is nothing deep about them ; all they do and all they 
have is on the surface. The superficial servant's work is 
done, but lazily, partially — not thoroughly. The superficial 
workman's labor will not bear looking into — but it bears a 
showy outside. The very dress of such persons betrays the 
slatternly, incomplete character of their minds. When re- 
ligion comes in contact with persons of this stamp, it shares 
the fate of every thing else. It is taken up in a superficial 
way. 

There is deep knowledge of human nature and exquisite 
fidelity to truth in the single touch by which the impression 
of religion on them is described. The seed sprang up quick- 
ly, and then withered away as quiclily, because it had no 
depth of root. There is a quick, easily-moved susceptibility 
that rapidly exhibits the slightest breath of those emotions 
which play upon the sarface of the soul, and then as rapidly 



38 Parable of the Sower, 

passes oif. In such persons words are ever at command— 
voluble and impassioned words. Tears flow readily. The 
expressive features exhibit every passing shade of thought 
Every thought and every feeling plays upon the surface ; ev- 
ery thing that is sown springs up at once with vehement veg- 
etation. But slightness and inconstancy go together with 
violence. " Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth 
speaketh." True ; but also out of the emptiness of the heart 
the mouth can speak even more volubly. He who can always 
find the word which is appropriate and adequate to his emo- 
tions is not the man whose emotions are deepest: warmth 
of feeling is one thing, permanence is another. On Tuesday 
last, they who went to the table most moved and touched 
were not necessarily those who raised in a wise observer's 
breast the strongest hope of persistence in the life of Christ. 
Rather those who were calm and subdued : that which 
springs up quickly often does so merely from this, that it has 
no depth of earth to give it room to strike its roots down and 
deep. 

A young man of this stamp came to Christ, running, kneel- 
ing, full of warm expressions, engaging gestures, and profess- 
ed admiration, worshipping and saying, " Good Master !" 
Lovable and interesting as such always are, Jesus loved him. 
But his religion lay all upon the surface, withered away when 
the depth of its meaning was explored. The test of self sac- 
rifice was applied to his apparent love. He was ready for 
any thing. Well, " Go, sell that thou hast," " and he went 
away sorrowful, for he had great possessions." It had 
sprung up quickly ; but it withered because it had no root. 

.And that is another stroke of truth in the delineation of 
this character. Not wealth nor comfort is the bane of its 
religion ; but " when tribulation or persecution ariseth be- 
cause of the word, by-and-by they are ofliended." A pleas- 
ant, sunny religion would be the life to suit them. "They 
receive the word with joy." So long as they have happiness 
they can love God, feel very grateful, and expand with gen- 
erous emotions. But when God speaks as he spoke to Job 
out of the whirlwind, and the sun is swept from the face of 
their heaven, and the sharp Cross is the only object left in 
the dreary landscape, and the world blames, and friends 
wound the wounded with cold speech and hollow common- 
places, what is there in superficial religion to keep the heart 
in its place, and vigorous still ? 

Another point. Not without significance is it represented 
that the superficial character is connected with the hard 
heart. Beneath the light thin surface of easily-stirred dust 



Parable of the Sower, 39 

^e^ tTie bed of rock. The shallow ground was stony ground. 
And it is among the children of light enjoyment and unset' 
tied life that we must look for stony heartlessness : not in the 
world of business — not among the poor, crushed to the earth 
by privation and suffering. These harden the character, but 
often leave the heart soft. If you wish to know what hol- 
lowness and heartlessness are, you must seek for them in the 
world of light, elegant, superficial fashion — where frivolity 
has turned the heart into a rockbed of selfishness. Say what 
men will of the heartlessness of trac'e, it is nothing compared 
with the heartlessness of fashion. Say what they will of the 
atheism of science, it is nothing to the atheism of that round 
of pleasure in which many a heart lives : dead while it lives. 

3. Once more, impressions come to nothing when the mind 
is subjected to dissipating influences, and yields to them. 
"Some fell among thorns." 

There is nutriment enough in the ground for thorns, and 
enough for wheat ; but not enough, in any ground, for both 
wheat and thorns. The agriculturist thins his nursery- 
ground, and the farmer weeds his field, and the gardener re- 
moves the superfluous grapes for that very reason, in order 
that the dissipated sap may be concentrated in a few plants 
vigorously. 

So in the same way the heart has a certain power of lov- 
ing. But love, dissipated on many objects, concentrates it- 
self on none. God or the world — not both. " No man can 
serve two masters." " If any man love the world, the love 
of the Father is not in him." He that has learned many ac- 
complishments or sciences, generally knows none thoroughly. 
Multifariousness of knowledge is commonly opposed to 
depth, variety of affections is generally not found with in- 
tensity. 

Two classes of dissipating influences distract such minds. 
" The cares of this w^orld, and the deceitfulness of riches, 
choke the word." The cares of this world — its petty trifling 
distractions — not wrong in themselves — simply dissipating 
— filling the heart with paltry solicitudes and mean anxieties 
— wearing. Martha was " cumbered with much serving." 
Her household and her domestic duties, real duties, divided 
her heart with Christ. The time of danger, therefore, is 
when life expands into new situations and larger spheres, 
bringing with them new cares. It is not in the earlier stages 
of existence that these distractions are felt. Thorns sprang 
up and choked the wheat as they grew together. You see 
a religious man taking up a new pursuit with eagerness. 
At first no danger is suspected. But it is a distractioii-^ 



40 Parable of the Sower, 

something that distracts or divides ; he has become dissipafr 
ed, and by-and-by you remark that his zest is gone ; he is no 
longer the man he was. He talks as before, but the life ia 
gone from what he says : his energies are frittered. The 
word is " choked." 

Again, the deceitfulness of riches dissipate. True as al- 
ways to nature, never exaggerating, never one-sided : Christ 
does not say that such religion brings forth no fruit, but 
only that it brings none to perfection. A fanatic bans all 
wealth and ail worldly care as the department of the devil : 
Christ says, " How hardly shall they that trust in riches en- 
ter into the kingdom of heaven." He does not say the di- 
vided heart has no religion, but that it is a dwarfed, stunted, 
feeble religion. Many such a Christian do you find among 
the rich and the titled, who, as a less encumbered man, 
might have been a resolute soldier of the Cross ; but he is 
only now a realization of the old Pagan fable — a spiritual 
giant buried under a mountain of gold. Oh ! many, many 
such we meet in our higher classes, pining with a nameless 
want, pressed by a heavy sense of the weariness of exist- 
ence, strengthless in the midst of affluence, and incapable 
even of tasting the profusion of comfort which is heaped 
around them. 

There is a way God their Father has of dealing with such 
which is no pleasant thing to bear. In agriculture it is call- 
ed weeding. In gardening it is done by pruning. It is the 
cutting off the over-luxuriant shoots, in order to call back 
the wandering juices into the healthier and more living 
parts. In religion it is described thus : " Every branch that 
beareth fruit he purgeth." .... Lot had such a danger, 
and v/as subjected to such a treatment. A quarrel had aris- 
en between Abraham's herdsmen and his. It was necessary 
to part. Abraham, in that noble way of his, gave him the 
choice of the country when they separated. Either hand 
for Abraham — either the right hand or the left : — what 
cared the Pilgrim of the Invisible for fertile lands or rugged 
sands? Lot chose wisely, as they of the world speak. 
Well, if this world be all — he got a rich soil — became a 
prince, had kings for his society and neighbors. It was 
nothing to Lot that " the men of the land were sinners be- 
fore the Lord exceedingly " — enough that it was well-water- 
ed everywhere. But his wife became enervated by volup- 
tuousness, and his children tainted with ineradicable corrup- 
tion — the moral miasma of tlie society wherein he had made 
his home. Two warnings God gave him : first, his home 
*nd property were spoiled by the enemy ; then came the firo 



I 



Parable of the Sower, 41 

from heaven ; and lie fled from the cities of the plain a ruiri" 
ed man. His wife looked back with lingering regret upon 
the splendid home of her luxury and voluptuousness, and 
was overwhelmed in the encrusting salt : his children car- 
ried with them into a new world the plague-spot of that 
profligacy which had been the child of affluence and idle- 
ness ; and the spirit of that rain of fire — of the buried Cities 
of the Plain — rose again in the darkest of the crimes which 
the Old Testament records, to poison the new society at its 
very fountain. And so the old man stood at last upon the 
brink of the grave, a blackened ruin scathed by lightning, 
over the grave of his wife, and the shame of his family — 
saved, but only " so as by fire." 

It is a painful thing, that weeding work. " Every branch 
in me that beareth fruit, He purgeth it, that it may bring 
forth more fruit." The keen edge of God's pruning-knife 
cuts sheer through. No weak tenderness stops Him whose 
love seeks goodness, not comfort, for His servants. A man's 
distractions are in his wealth — and perhaps fire or failure 
make him bankrupt : what he feels is God's sharp knife. 
Pleasure has dissipated his heart, and a stricken frame for- 
bids his enjoying pleasure — shattered nerves and broken 
health wear out the Life of life. Or perhaps it comes in a 
sharper, sadder form ; the shaft of death goes home ; there 
is heard the wail of danger in his household. And then, 
when sickness has passed on to hopelessness, and hopeless- 
ness has passed on to death, the crushed man goes into the 
chamber of the dead ; and there, when he shuts down the 
lid upon the coffin of his wife, or the coffin of his child, his 
heart begins to tell him the meaning of all this. Thorns 
had been growing in his heart, and the sharj) knife has been 
at work making room — but by an awful desolation — tearing 
up and cutting down, that the life of God in the soul may 
not be choked. 

n. For the permanence of religious impressions this para- 
ble suggests three requirements: " They on the good ground 
are they which, in an honest and good heart, having heard 
the word keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience." 

1. " An honest and good heart." Earnestness : that is, 
sincerity of purpose. Now, sincerity is reckoned by an ex- 
aggeration, sometimes, the only virtue. So that a man be 
sincere, they say, it matters little what he thinks or what he 
is ; but in truth is the basis of all goodness ; without which 
goodness of any kind is impossible. There are faults mor^ 
heinous, but none more ruinous, than insincerity. Subtle 



42 Parable of the Sower, 

minds, which have no broad, firm footing in reality, lose 
every thing by degrees, and may be transformed into any 
shape of evil ; may become guilty of any thing, and excuse 
it to themselves. To this sincerity is given, in the parable, 
success : a harvest thirty-fold, sixty-fold, a hundred-fold. 

This earnestness is the first requisite for real success in 
3very thing. Do you wish to become rich ? You may be- 
come rich : that is, if you desire it in no half-way, but thor- 
oughly. A miser sacrifices all to this single passion ; hoards 
farthings, and dies possessed of wealth. Do you wish to 
master any science or accomplishment ? Give yourself to it, 
and it lies beneath your feet. Time and pains will do any 
thing. This world is given as the prize for the men in ear- 
nest ; and that which is true of this world is truer still of the 
world to come. " The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, 
and the violent take it by force." Only there is this diflTer- 
ence : In the pursuit of wealth, knowledge, or reputation, 
circumstances have power to mar the wisest schemes. The 
hoard of years may be lost in a single night. The wisdom 
hived up by a whole life may perish when some fever impairs 
memory. But in the kingdom of Christ, where inward cAar- 
acter is the prize, no chance can rob earnestness of its exactly 
proportioned due of success. " Whatsoever a man soweth, 
that shall he also reap." There is no blight, nor mildew, nor 
scorching sun, nor rain-deluge, which can turn that harvest 
into a failure. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on 
earth." .... Sow for time, and probably you will succeed 
in time. Sow the seeds of life — humbleness, pure-hearted- 
ness, love; and in the long eternity which lies before the 
Boul, every minutest grain will come up again with an in- 
crease of thirty, sixty, or a hundred-fold. 

2. Meditation is a second requisite for permanence. They 
heep the word wliich they have heard. 

Now, meditation is often confounded with something which 
only partially resembles it. Sometimes we sit in a kind of day- 
dream, the mind expatiating far away into vacancy, whilst 
minutes and hours slip by, almost unmarked, in mere vacuity. 
This is not meditation, but reverie — a state to which the soul 
resigns itself in pure passivity. When the soul is absent 
and dreaming, let no man think that that is spiritual medita- 
tion, or any thing that is spiritual. 

Meditation is partly a passive, partly an active state. 
Whoever has pondered long over a plan which he is anxious 
to accomplish, without distinctly seeing at first the way, 
knows what meditation is. The subject itself presents itself 
in leisure moments spontaneously : but then all this sets the 



Parable of the Sower, 43 

mind at work — contriving, imagining, rejecting, modifying 
It is in this way that one of the greatest of English engineers, 
a man uncouth and unaccustomed to regular discipline of 
mind, is said to have accomplished his most marvellous tri- 
umphs. He threw bridges over almost impracticable tor- 
rents, and pierced the eternal mountains for his viaducts. 
Sometimes a difficulty brought all the work to a pause : then 
he would shut himself up in his room, eat nothing, speak to 
no one, abandon himself intensely to the contemplation of 
that on which his heart was set ; and at the end of two or 
three days, would come forth serene and calm, walk to the 
spot, and quietly give orders which seemed the result of su- 
perhuman intuition. This was meditation. 

Again, he knows what it is, who has ever earnestly and 
sincerely loved one living human being. The image of his 
friend rises unbidden by day and night, stands before his soul 
in the street and in the field, comes athwart his every 
thought, and mixes its presence with his every plan. So far 
all is passive. But besides this he plans and contrives for 
that other's happiness, tries to devise what would give pleas- 
ure, examines his own conduct and conversation, to avoid 
that which can by any possibility give pain. This is medi- 
tation. 

So, too, is meditation on religious truths carried on. If it 
first be loved, it will recur spontaneously to the heart. 

But then it is dwelt on till it receives innumerable applica- 
tions — is again and again brought up to the sun and tried in 
various lights, and so incorporates itself with the realities of 
practical existence. 

Meditation is done in silence. By it we renounce our nar- 
row individuality, and expatiate into that which is infinite. 
Only in the sacredness of inward silence does the soul truly 
meet the secret, hiding God. The strength of resolve, which 
afterwards shapes life and mixes itself with action, is the fruit 
of those sacred, solitary moments. There is a divdne depth in 
silence. We meet God alone. 

For this reason, I urged it upon so many of you to spend 
the hour previous to your Confirmation separate from friends, 
from books, from every thing human, and to force yourselves 
into the Awful Presence. 

Have we never felt how human presence, if frivolous, in 
such moments frivolizes the soul, and how impossible it is to 
come in contact with any thoughts which are sublime, or 
drink in one inspiration which is from Heaven, without de* 
grading it, even though surrounded by all that would natu- 
rally suggest tender and awful feeling, when such are by ? 



44 Parable of the Sower, 

It is not the number of books you read, nor the variety of 
sermons which you hear, nor the amount of religious conver* 
sation in which you mix ; but it is the frequency and the 
earnestness with which you meditate on these things, till the 
truth w^hich may be in them becomes your own, and part of 
your owm being, that insures your spiritual growth. 

3. The third requisite is endurance. " They bring forth 
fruit with patience." Patience is of two kinds. There is an 
active, and there is a passive endurance. The former is a 
masculine, the latter for the most part a feminine virtue. 
Female patience is exhibited chiefly in fortitude — in bearing 
pain and sorrow meekly without complaining. In the old 
Hebrew life, female endurance shines almost as brightly as in 
any life w^hich Christianity itself can mould. Hannah, under 
the provocations and taunts of her rival, answering not again 
her husband's rebuke, humbly replying to Eli's unjust blame, 
is true to the type of womanly endurance. For the type of 
man's endurance you may look to the patience of the early 
Christians under persecution. They came away from the San- 
hedrim to endure and bear; but it w^as to bear as conquerors 
rushing on to victory, preaching the truth with all boldness, 
and defying the power of the united w^orld to silence them. 
These two diverse qualities are joined in One, and only One of 
w^oman born, in perfection. One there Avas in w^hom human na- 
ture was exhibited in all its elements symmetrically complete. 
One in whom, as I lately said, there met all that w^as manliest 
and all that was most womanly. His endurance of pain and 
grief w^as that of the woman rather than the man. A tender 
spirit dissolving into tears, meeting the dark hour not wdth 
the stern defiance of the man and the stoic, but wdth gentle- 
ness, and trust, and love, and shrinking, like a woman. But 
when it came to the question in Pilate's judgment-hall, or the 
mockeries of Herod's men of war, or the discussion w^ith the 
Pharisees, or the exposure of the hollow falsehoods by which 
social, domestic, and religious life w^ere sapped, the woman 
has disappeared, and the hardy resohition of the man, with 
more than manly daring, is found in her stead. This is the 
"patience" for us to cultivate: To bear and to persevere. 
However dark and profitless, however painful and weary ex- 
istence may have become, however any man like Elijah may 
be tempted to cast himself beneath tlie juniper-tree and say, 
" It is enough : now, O Lord !" life is not done, and our Chris- 
tian character is not won, so long as God has any thing left 
for us to suffer, or any thing left for us to do. 

Patience, however, has another meaning. It is the oppo- 
site of that impatience which can not wait. This is one of 



Parable of the Sower, 45 

the ^lifficulties of spiritual life. We are disappointed if the 
harvest do not come at once. 

Last Tuesday, doubtless, you thought that all was done, 
and that there would be no more falling back. 

Alas ! a little experience will correct that. If the hus- 
bandman, disappointed at the delay which ensues before the 
blade breaks the soil, were to rake away the earth to exam- 
ine if germination were going on, he would have a poor har- 
vest. He must have " long patience, till he receive the early 
and the latter rain." The winter frost must mellow the seed 
lying in the genial bosom of the earth : the rains of spring 
must swell it, and the suns of summer mature it. So with 
you. It is the work of a long life to become a Christian. 
Many, oh, many a time are we tempted to say, *' I make no 
progress at all. It is only failure after failure. Nothing 
grows." Now look at the sea when the flood is coming m. 
Go and stand by the sea-beach, and you will think that the 
ceaseless flux and reflux is but retrogression equal to the ad- 
vance. But look again in an hour's time, and the whole 
ocean has advanced. Every advance has been beyond the 
last, and every retrograde movement has been an impercep- 
tible trifle less than the last. This is progress : to be esti- 
mated at the end of hours, not minutes. And this is Chris- 
tian progress. Many a fluctuation — many a backward mo- 
tion with a rush at times so vehement that all seems lost ; 
but if the eternal work be real, every failure has been a real 
gain, and the next does not carry us so far back as we were 
before. Every advance is a real gain, and part of it is never 
lost. Both when we advance and when *we fail, we gain. 
We are nearer to God than we were. The flood of spirit- 
life has carried us up higher on the everlasting shores, where 
the waves of life beat no more, and its fluctuations end, and 
all is safe at last. "This is the faith and patience of the 
saints." 

It is because of the second of these requirements, medita- 
tion, that I am anxious we should meet on Sunday next for 
an early Communion at eight o'clock. I desire that the can- 
didates may have a more solemn and definite Communion 
of their own, with few others present except their own rela- 
tions and friends. In silence and quietness, we will meet 
together then. Before the Avorld has put on its full robe of 
light, and before the busy gay crowd have begun to throng 
our streets — before the distractions of the day begin, we will 
consecrate the early freshness of our souls — untrodden, un« 
hardened, undissipated — to God. We will meet in the sim* 
plicity of brotherhood and sisterhood. We will have Com* 



45 Jacob's Wrestling. 

munion in a sacred meal, which shall exhibit as nearly as 
may be the idea of family aifection. Ye that are beginning 
life, and we who know something of it^ye that offer your- 
selves for the first time at that table, and we who, after sad 
experience and repeated failure, still desire again to renew 
our aspirations and our vows to Him — we will come and 
breathe together that prayer which I commended to you at 
your Confirmation — " Our Father, which art in heaven, lead 
us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." 



III. 
JACOB'S WRESTLING. 



** And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel : for as 
ft prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed. And 
Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, 
Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? ,And he blessed him 
there.' — Gen. xxxii. 28, 29. 

The complexion of this story is peculiarly Jewish. It 
contains three points which are specially interesting to every 
Jew m a national point of view. It explained to him why 
he was called Israelite. It traces the origin of his own 
name, Israelite, to a distant ancestor, who had signally ex- 
hibited religious strength, and been, in the language of those 
times, a wrestler with God, from whence he had obtained 
the name Israel It casts much deep and curious interest 
round an otherwise insignificant village, Peniel", where this 
transaction had taken place, and which derived its name 
from it, Peniel, the face of God. And, besides, it explained 
the origin of a singular custom, which might seem a super- 
stitious one, of not suffering a particular muscle to be eaten, 
and regarding it with a kind of religious awe, as the part in 
which Jacob was said by tradition to have been injured, by 
the earnest tension of his frame during this struggle. So far 
all is Jev/ish, narrow, merely of local interest. Besides this, 
(much of the story is evidently mythical. 

It is clear at once that it beloiigs to that earlier period 
of literature when traditions were preserved in a poetical 
shape, adapted to the rude conceptions of the day, but en- 
shrining an inner and a deeper truth. To disengage this 
truth from the form in which it is encased is the duty of 
the expositor. 

Now, putting aside the form of this narrative, and looking 



JacGb's Wrestling, *47 

into the heart and meaning of it, it will become apparent 
that we have no longer any thing infantine, or Jewish, or of 
limited interest, but a wide truth, wide as human nature ; and 
that there is before us the record of an inward spiritual 
struggle, as real now in the nineteenth century as then : -as 
realin every earnest man as it was in the history of Jacob. 
We take these points : 

I. The nameless secret of existence. 
II. The revelation of that secret to the soul. 

The circumstances which preceded this event were these : 
more than twenty years before, Jacob had been guilty of a 
deliberate sin. He had deceived his father; he had over- 
reached his free-spirited, impetuous, open-hetirted brother 
Esau. Never, during all those twenty years, had he seen 
the man whom he had injured. But now, on the point of 
returning to his native country, news was brought to him of 
his brother's approach, which made a meeting inevitable. 
Jacob made all his dispositions and arrangejnents to pre- 
pare for the worst. He sent over the brook Jabbok first 
the part of his family whom he valued least, and who would 
be the first to meet Esau ; then those whom he loved most, 
that, in the event of danger, they might have the greatest 
facility in escaping ; then Jacob was left alone, in the still 
dark night. It was one of those moments in existence when 
a crisis is before us, to which great and pregnant issues are 
linked — when all has been done that foresight can devise, 
and the hour of action being past, the instant of reaction has 
come. Then the soul is left passive and helpless, gazing face 
to face upon the anticipated and dreadful moment w^hich is 
slowly moving on. It is in these hours that, having gone 
through in imagination the whole circle of resources and 
found them nothing, and ourselves powerless, as in the hands 
of a Destiny, there comes a strange and nameless dread, a 
horrible feeling of insecurity, which gives the consciousness 
of a want, and forces us to feel out into the abyss for some- 
thing that is mightier than flesh and blood to lean upon. 

Then, therefore, it was that there came the moment of a 
conflict within the soul of Jacob, so terrible and so violent 
that it seemed an actual struggle with a living man. In the 
darkness he had heard a voice, and came in contact with a 
Form, and felt a Presence, the reality of which there was no 
mistaking. Now, to the unscientific mind, that which is 
real seems to be necessarily material too. What wonder 
if, to the unscientific mind*^ of Jacob, this conflict, so real, 
and attended in his person with such tangible result^ 



48 Jacob's Wrestling, 

seemed all human and material — a conflict with a tangi- 
ble antagonist ? What wonder if tradition preserved it in 
such a form ? Suppose we admit that the Being whose 
awful presence Jacob felt had no form which could be grap- 
pled by a human hand, is it less real for that ? Are there no 
realities but those which the hand can touch and the eye see ? 

Jacob in that hour felt the dark secret and mystery of ex- 
istence. 

Upon this I shall make three remarks. 

1. The first has reference to the contrast observable be 
tween this and a former revelation made to Jacob's soul. 
This was not the first time it had found itself face to face 
with God. Twenty years before, he had seen in vision a 
ladder reared against the sky, and angels ascending and de- 
scending on it. Exceedingly remarkable. Immediately 
after his transgression, when leaving his father's home, a ban- 
ished man, to be a wanderer for many years, this first meet- 
ing took place. Fresh from his sin, God met him in tender- 
ness and forgiveness. He saw the token which told him that 
all communication between heaven and earih was not sever- 
ed. The way was clear and unimpeded still. Messages of 
reciprocated love might pass between the Father and His 
sinful child, as the angels in the dream ascended and de- 
scended on the visionary ladder. The possibility of saintliness 
was not forfeited. All that the vision taught him. Then 
took place that touching covenant, in which Jacob bound 
himself to serve gratefully his father's God, and vowed the 
vow of a consecrated heart to Him. All that was now past. 
After twenty years God met him again ; but this second in- 
tercourse was of a very different character. It was no lon- 
ger God the Forgiver, God the Protector, God the covenant- 
ing Love, that met Jacob ; but God the Awful, the Unnam- 
able, whose breath blasts, at whose touch the flesh of the 
mortal shrinks and shrivels up. This is exactly the reverse 
of what might have been anticipated. You would have ex- 
pected the darker vision of experience to come first. First 
the storm-struggle of the soul; then the vision of peace. It 
was exactly the reverse. 

Yet all this, tried by experience, is a most true and living 
account. The awful feelings about Life and God are not 
those which characterize our earlier years. It is quite natu- 
ral that in the first espousals of the soul in its freshness to 
God, bright and hopeful feelings should be the predominant 
or the only ones. Joy mai'ks, and ought to mark, early re- 
ligion. Nay, by God's merciful arrangement, even sin is not 
that crushing thing in early life which it sometimes becomes 



Jacob's Wrestling. 49 

!n later years, when we mourn not so much a calculable 
number of sinful acts, as a deep pervading sinfulness. Re- 
morse does not corrode with its evil power then. Forgiveness 
is not only granted, but consciously and joyfully felt. It is 
as life matures, that the weight of life, the burden of this un- 
intelligible world, and the mystery of the hidden God, are 
felt. 

A vast amount of insincerity is produced by mistaking 
this. We expect in the religion of the child the experience 
which can only be true in the religion of the man. We 
force into their lips the language which describes the wrest- 
ling of the soul with God. It is twenty years too soon. God, 
in His awfulness, the thought of mystery which scathes the 
soul, how can they know that yet before they have got the 
thews and sinews of the man's heart to master such a 
thought ? They know nothing yet — they ought to know 
nothing yet of God but as the Father who is around their 
beds — they ought to see nothing yet but Heaven, and angels 
ascending and descending. 

This morning, my young brethren, you presented your- 
selves at the communion-table for the first time. Some of 
you, we trust, were conscious of meeting God. Only let us 
not confound the dates of Christian experience. If you did, 
it was not as Jacob met God on this occasion, but rather as 
he met Him on the earlier one. It were only a miserable 
forcing of insincerity upon you to require that this solemn, 
fearful sensation of his should be yours. Rather, we trust, 
you felt God present as the Lord of Love. A ladder was 
raised for you to heaven. Oh, we trust that the feeling in 
some cases at least was this — as of angels ascending and de- 
scending upon a child of God. 

2. Again I remark, that the end and aim of Jacob's strug- 
gle was to know the name of God. " Tell me, I pray thee, 
thy name." A very unimportant desire at first sight. For 
what signifies a name ? In these days, when names are only 
epithet«5, it signifies nothing. " Jehovah, Jove, or Lord," as 
the " Universal Prayer " insinuates, are all the same. Now, 
to assert that it matters not whether God be called Jehovah, 
Jove, or Lord, is true, if it mean this, that a devout and ear- 
nest heart is accepted by God, let the name be what it will 
by which He is addressed. But if it mean that Jove and Je- 
hovah express the same Being — that the character of Him 
whom the Pagan worshipped was the same as the character 
of Him whom Israel adored under the name of Jehovah— 
that they refer to the same group of ideas, or that always 
names are but names, then we must look much deeper. 



50 Jacob's Wrestling, 

In the Hebrew history are discernible three periods dis- 
tinctly marked, in which names and w^ords bore very differ- 
ent characters. These three, it has been observed by acute 
philologists, correspond to the periods in which the nation 
bore the three different appellations of Hebrews, Israelites, 
Jews. 

In the first of these periods names meant truths, and words 
were the symbols of realities. The characteristics of the 
names given then were simplicity and sincerity. They were 
drawn from a few simple sources : either from some charac- 
teristic of the individual, as Jacob, The Supplanter^ or Moses, 
Drawn from the Water ; or from the idea of family, as Ben- 
jamin, The Son of my Right Hand ; or from the conception 
of the tribe or nation, then gradually consolidating itself; or, 
lastly, from the religious idea of God. But in this case not 
the highest notion of God — not Jah or Jehovah, but simply 
the earlier and simpler idea of Deity : El — Israel, The Prince 
of El; Peniel, The Face of El 

Ik these days names were real, but the conceptions they 
contained were not the loftiest. 

The second period begins about the time of the departure 
from Egypt, and it is characterized by unabated simplicity, 
with the addition of sublimer thouo^ht and feelins; more in- 
tensely religious. The heart of the nation was big with 
mighty and new religious truth — and the feelings with which 
the national heart was swelling found vent in the names 
which were given abundantly. God, under His name Jah, 
the noblest assemblage of spiritual truths yet conceived, be- 
came the adjunct to names of places and persons. Oshea's 
name is changed into Je-hoshua. 

Observe, moreover, that in this period there was no fas- 
tidious, over-refined chariness in the use of that name. Men 
conscious of deep and real reverence are not fearful of the 
appearance of irreverence. The word became a common 
word, as it always may, so long as it \^ felt^ and awe is real. 
A mighty cedar was called a cedar of Jehovah, a lofty mount- 
ain, a mountain of Jehovah. Human beauty even was praised 
by such an epithet. Moses was divinely fair, beautiful to 
God. The Eternal name became an adjunct. No beauty- 
no greatness — no goodness, was conceivable, except as ema- 
nating from Him: therefore His name was freely but most 
devoutly used. 

Like the earlier period, in this too, words mean realities ; 
but, unlike the earlier period, they are impregnated with 
deeper religious tliought. 

The third period was at its v;enith in the tinie of Chrigi*^ 



Jacob's Wrestling. 51 

words liad lost their meaning, and shared the hollow, unreal 
state of all things. A man's name might be Judas, and still 
he might be a traitor. A man might be called Pharisee — ex- 
clusively religious — and yet the name might only cover the 
hollo wness of hypocrisy ; or he might be called most noble 
Festus, and be the meanest tyrant that ever sat upon a pro- 
consular chair. This is the period in which every keen and 
wise observer knows that the decay of national religious feel- 
mg has begun. That decay in the meaning of words, that 
lowering of the standard of the ideas for which they stand, 
is a certain mark of this. The debasement of a language is 
a sure mark of the debasement of a nation. The insincerity 
of a language is a proof of the insincerity of a nation : for a 
time comes in the history of a nation when words no longer 
stand for things ; when names are given for the sake of an 
euphonious sound ; and when titles are but the epithets of 
unmeaning courtesy : — a time when Majesty — Defender of 
the Faith — Most Noble — Worshipful, and Honorable — not 
only mean nothing, but do not flush the cheek with the 
shame of convicted falsehood when they are worn as empty 
ornaments. 

The name of God shares this fate. A nation may reach 
the state in which the Eternal Name can be used to point 
a sentence, or adorn a familiar conversation, and no longer 
shock the ear with the sound of blasphemy, because in good 
truth the name no longer stands for the highest, but for a 
meaner conception, an idol of the debased mind. For exam- 
ple, in a foreign language, the language of a light and irre- 
ligious people, the Eternal Name can be used as a light ex- 
pletive and conversational ejaculation, and not shock any 
religious sensibility. You could not do that in English. It 
would sound like a blasphemy to say, in light talk, My God J 
or Good God ! Your flesh w^ould creep at hearing it. But 
in that language the word has lost its sacredness, because it 
has lost its meaning. It means no more than Jove or Baal. 
It means a being whose existence has become a nursery fable. 
No marvel that we are taught to pray, "Hallowed be Thy 
name." We can not pray a deeper prayer for our country 
than to say. Never may that name in English stand for a 
lower idea than it stands for now. There is a solemn powet 
in words, because words are the expression of character. 
"By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words 
thou shalt be condemned." 

Yet in this period, exactly in proportion as the solemnity 
of the idea was gone, reverence was scrupulously paid to the 
corpse-like word which remained and had once inclosed it 



52 yacob's Wrestling. 

In that hollow, artificial age, the Jew would wipe his pen 
before he ventured to write the name — he would leave out 
the vowels of the sacred Jehovah, and substitute those of the 
less sacred Elohim. In that kind of age, too, men bow to 
the name of Jesus often just in that proportion in which they 
have ceased to recognize His true grandeur and majesty of 
character. 

In such an age it would be indeed preposterous to spend 
the strength upon an inquiry such as this : " Tell me Thy 
Name ?" Jehovah, Jove, or Lord — what matter ? But Jacob 
did not live in this third period, when names meant nothing, 
nor did he live in the second, when words contained the deep- 
est truth the nation is ever destined to receive. But he lived 
in the first age, when men are sincere, and truthful, and ear- 
nest, and names exhibit character. To tell Jacob the name 
of God was to reveal to him what God is and who. 

3. I observe a third thing. This desire of Jacob was not 
the one we should naturally have expected on such an occa- 
sion. He is alone — his past fault is coming retributively on 
a guilty conscience — he dreads the meeting with his brother. 
His soul is agonized w^ith that^ and that we naturally expect 
will be the subject and the burden of his prayer. No such 
thing ! Not a word about Esau — not a word about person- 
al danger at all. All that is banished completely for the 
time, and deeper thoughts are grappling with his soul. 
To get safe through to-morrow ? No, no, no ! To be 
blessed by God — to know Him, and what He is — that is the 
battle of Jacob's soul from sunset till the dawn of day. 

And this is our struggle — the struggle. Let any true 
man go down into the deeps of his own being, and answer 
us — what is the cry that comes from the most real part of 
his nature ? Is it the cry for daily bread? Jacob asked for 
that in \\\^ first communing with God — preservation, safety. 
Ts it even this — to be forgiven our sins ? Jacob had a sin to 
be forgiven, and in that most solemn moment of his exist- 
ence he did not say a syllable about it. Or is it this — 
"Hallowed be thy name?" No, my brethren. Out of our 
frail and yet sublime humanity, the demand that rises in the 
earthlier hours of our religion may be this — Save my soul ; 
but in the most unearthly moments it is this — " Tell me thy 
Name." We move through a world of mystery ; and the 
deepest question is. What is the being that is ever near, 
sometimes felt, never seen — That which has haunted us 
from childhood with a dream of something surpassingly fair, 
which has never yet been realized — That which sweeps 
through the soul at times as a desolation, like the blast 



Jacob's Wrestling, 53 

from the wings of the Angel of Death, leaving us stricken 
and silent in our loneliness — That which has touched us in 
our tenderest point, and the flesh has quivered with agony, 
and our mortal affections have shrivelled up with pain — 
That which comes to us in aspirations of nobleness, and con- 
ceptions of superhuman excellence ? Shall we say It or He ? 
What is It ? Who is He ? Those anticipations of Immor- 
tality and God — what are they ? Are they the mere throb- 
bings of my own heart, heard and mistaken for a living 
something beside me ? Are they the sound of my own 
wishes, echoing through the vast void of nothingness? or 
shall I call them God, Father, Spirit, Love ? A living Be- 
ing within me or outside me ? Tell me Thy Name, thou 
awful mystery of Loveliness ! This is the struggle of all 
earnest life. 

We come now to — 

n. The revelation of the mystery. 

1. It was revealed by awe. Very significantly are we 
told, that the Divine antagonist seemed, as it were, anxious 
to depart as the day was about to dawn, and that Jacob 
held Him more convulsively fast, as if aware that the day- 
light was likely to rob him of his anticipated blessing, in 
which there seems concealed a very deep truth. God is ap- 
proached more nearly in that which is indefinite than in 
that which is definite and distinct. He is felt in awe, and 
wonder, and worship, rather than in clear conceptions. 
There is a sense in which darkness has more of God than 
liglit has. He dwells in the thick darkness. Moments of 
tender, vague mystery often bring distinctly the feeling of 
His presence. When day breaks and distinctness comes, 
the Divine has evaporated from the soul like morning dew. 
In sorrow, haunted by uncertain presentiments, we feel the 
Infinite around us. The gloom disperses, the world's joy 
comes again, and it seems as if God were gone — the Being 
who had touched us with a withering hand, and wrestled 
with us, yet whose presence, even when most terrible, was 
more blessed than His absence. It is true, even literally, 
that the darkness reveals God. Every morning God draws 
the curtain of the garish light across His eternity, and we 
lose the Infinite. We look down on earth instead of up to 
heaven, on a narrower and more contracted spectacle — that 
which is examined by the microscope when the telescope is 
laid aside — smallness, instead of vastness. "Man goeth 
forth unto his work and to his labor till the evening ;" and 
in the dust and pettiness of life we seem to cease to behold 



54 yacoUs Wrestling, 

Him : then at night He undraws the curtain again, and we 
see how much of God and eternity the bright distinct day- 
has hidden from us. Yes, in solitary, silent, vague darkness, 
the Awful One is near. 

This morning, young brethren, we endeavored to act on 
this belief; we met in stillness, before the full broad glare of 
day had rested on our world. Your first Communion im-= 
plored His blessing in the earlier hour which seems so pecu- 
liarly His. Before the dull, and deadening, and earthward 
influences of the world had dried up the dew of fresh morn- 
ing feeling, you tried to fortify your souls with a sense of 
His presence. This night, before to-morrow's light shall 
dawn, pray that He will not depart until He has left upon 
your hearts the blessing of a strength which shall be yours 
through the garish day, and through dry, scorching life, even 
to the close of your days. 

2. Again, this revelation was made in an unsyllabled 
blessing. Jacob requested two things. He asked for a 
blessing and he prayed to know the name of God. God 
gave him the blessing. " He blessed him there," but refused 
to tell His name. " Wherefore dost thou ask after my 
name ?" 

In \his, too, seems to lie a most important truth. Names 
have a power, a strange power, of hiding God. Speech has 
been bitterly defined as the art of hiding thought. Well, 
that sarcastic definition has in it a truth. The Eternal 
Word is the Revealer of God's thought, and every true word 
of man is originally the expression of a thought ; but by de- 
grees the word hides the thought. Language is valuable 
for the things of this life ; but" for the things of the other 
world, it is an encumbrance almost as much as an assistance. 
Words often hide from us our ignorance of even earthly 
truth. The child asks for information, and we satiate his 
curiosity with words. Who does not know how we satisfy 
ourselves with the name of some strange bird or plant, or the 
name of some new law in nature ? It is a mystery perplex- 
ing us before. We get the name, and fancy we understand 
something more than we did before, but, in truth, we are 
more hopelessly ignorant; for before we felt there was a 
something we had not attained, and so we inquired and 
searched : now, we fancy we possess it, because we have got 
the name by which it is known, and the word covers over the 
abyss of our ignorance. If Jacob had got a ?^orr/, that word 
might have satisfied him. He would have said. Now I un- 
derstand God, and know all about Him. 

Besides, names and words soon lose their meaning. In 



yacob^s Wrestling, 55 

tfte process of years and centuries the meaning dies oft tnem 
like the sunlight from the hills. The hills are there — the 
color and life are gone. The words of that creed, for exam- 
ple, which we read last Sunday (the Athanasian), were living 
words a few centuries ago. They have changed their mean- 
ing, and are, to ninety-nine out of every hundred, only dead 
words. Yet men tenaciously hold to the expressions of 
which they do not understand the meaning, and which have 
a very different meaning now from what they had once — 
Person, Procession, Substance : and they are almost worse 
with them than without them — for they conceal their igno- 
rance, and place a barrier against the earnestness of inquiry. 
We repeat the creed by rote, but the profound truths of Be- 
ing which the creed contains, how many of us understand ? 

All this affords an instructive lesson to parents and to 
teachers. In the education of a pupil or a child, the wise 
way is to deal with him as God dealt with his pupil, the 
child-man Jacob : for before the teaching of God, the wisest 
man, what is he but a child ? God's plan was not to give 
names and words, but truths of feeling. That night, in that 
strange scene. He impressed on Jacob's soul a religious awe 
which was hereafter to develop, not a set of formal expres- 
sions, which would have satisfied with husks the cravings of 
the intellect and shut up the soul. Jacob felt the Infinite, 
who was more truly felt when least named. Words would 
have reduced that to the Finite : for, oh, to know all about 
God is one thing — to know the living God is another. Our 
rule seems to be this : Let a child's religion be expansive — 
capable, of expansion — as little systematic as possible : let it 
lie upon the heart like the light loose soil, which can be 
broken through as the heart bursts into fuller life. If it be 
trodden down hard and stiff in formularies, it is more than 
probable that the whole must be burst through, and broken 
violently, and thrown off altogether, when the soul requires 
room to germinate. 

And in this way, my young brethren, I have tried to deal 
with you. Not in creeds, nor even in the stiffness of the 
catechism, has truth been put before you. Kather has it 
been trusted to the impulses of the heart — on which, we 
believe, God works more efficaciously than we can do. A 
few simple truths : and then these have been left to work, 
and germinate, and swell. Baptism reveals to you this truth 
for the heart, that God is your Father, and that Christ has 
encouraged you to live as your Father's children. It has re- 
vealed that name which Jacob knew not — Love. Confirma- 
tion has told you another truth, that of self-dedication to 



56 yacob's Wrestling, 

Him. Heaven is the service of God. The highest blessed- 
ness of life is powers and self consecrated to His will. These 
are the germs of truth ; but it would have been miserable 
self-delusion, and most pernicious teaching, to have aimed at 
exhausting truth, or systematizing it. We are jealous of over- 
systematic teaching. God's love to you — the sacrifice of 
your lives to God — but the meaning of that? Oh, a long, 
long life will not exhaust the meaning — the Name of God. 
Feel him more and more — all else is but empty words. 

Lastly, the effect of this revelation was to change Jacob's 
character. His name was changed from Jacob to Israel, 
because himself was an altered man. Hitherto there had 
been something subtle in his character — a certain cunning 
and craft — a want of breadth, as if he had no firm footing 
upon reality. The forgiveness of God twenty years before 
had not altered this. He remained Jacob, the subtle sup- 
planter still. For, indeed, a man whose religion is chiefly 
the sense of forgiveness, does not thereby rise into integrity 
or firmness of character — a certain tenderness of character 
may very easily go along with a great deal of subtlety. 
Jacob was tender and devout, and grateful for God's pardon, 
and only half honest still. But this half-insincere man is 
brought into contact with the awful God, and his subtlety 
falls from him. He becomes real at once. Every insincere 
habit of mind shrivels in the face of God. One clear, true 
/lance into the depths of Being, and the whole man is altered. 
The name changes because the character is changed. No 
longer Jacob, The Supplanter^ but Israel, The Prince of God — • 
the champion of the Lord, who had fought with God and 
conquered ; and who, henceforth, will fight for God, and be 
His true, loyal soldier : a larger, more unselfish name — a 
larger and more unselfish man — honest and true at last. 
No man becomes honest till he has got face to face with 
God. There is a certain insincerity about us all — a some- 
thing dramatic. One of those dreadful moments which 
throw us upon ourselves, and strip off the hollowness ot our 
outside show, must come before the insincere is true. 

And again, young brethren, such a moment, at least of 
truthfulness, ought to have been this morning. Let the old 
pass. Let the name of the world pass into the Christian 
name. Baptism and Confirmation, the one gives, and the 
other reminds us of the giving of a better name and a truer. 
Henceforth be men. Lose the natural frailty, whatever it is. 
See God, and you will lose it. 

To conclude, here is a question for each man separately— 
What is the name of your God ? Not in the sense of this 



Christian Progress by Oblivion oj the Past, 5 7 

tige, but in the sense of Jacob's age. What is the Name of 
the Deity you worship? In the present modern sense of 
Name, by which nothing more than epithet is meant, of 
course the reply is easy. The Name of yours is the God of 
Christian worship — the Threefold One — the Author of Exist- 
ence, manifested in Divine Humanity, commingling with ua 
as pure Spirit — the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. That, of 
course, you say is the name of your God. Now, put away 
names — give words to the winds. What do you adore in 
your heart of hearts ? What is the name ofteuest on your 
lips in your unfettered, spontaneous moments ? If we over- 
heard your secret thoughts, who and what is it which is to 
you the greatest and the best that you would desire to real- 
ize ? The character of the rich man, or the successful, or the 
admired ? Would the worst misery which could happen to 
you be the wreck of property — the worst shame, not to have 
done wrong, but to have sunk in the estimation of society ? 
Then in the classifications of earth, which separate men into 
Jews, Christians, Mohammedans, you may rank as a worship- 
per of the Christian's God. But in the nomenclature of 
Heaven, where names can not stand for things, God sees you 
as an idolator — your highest is not His highest. The Name 
that is above every name is not the description of your God. 
For life and death we have made our choice. The life of 
Christ — the life of Truth and Love ; and if it must be, as the 
result of that, the Cross of Christ, with the obloquy and 
shame that wait on truth — that is the name before which we 
bow. In this world "there are gods many, and lords 
many : but to us there is but one Lord, the Father of our 
Lord Jesus Christ." 



IV. 

CHRISTIAN PROGRESS BY OBLIVION OF 
THE PAST. 

*' Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended : but this one thing I 
do ; forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those 
things which are before, I press towards the mark for the prize of the high 
calling of God in Christ Jesus." — Phil. iii. 13, 14. 

The first thing which strikes us on reading these verses 
is, that the Apostle Paul places himself on a level with the 
persons whom he addresses. He speaks to them as frail, 
weak men, and he gives them in himself a specimeri of what 



58 Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past 

frailty and weakness can achieve in the strength of Christ 
And it is for this reason that the passage before us is one of 
the most encouraging in all the writings of St. Paul. Fof 
there is one aspect in which the apostle is presented to us, 
which is perhaps a depressing one. When we look at his al- 
most superhuman career, reverence and admiration we must 
feel ; but so far does he seem removed from ordinary life that 
imitation appears out of the question. Let us select but two 
instances of this discouraging aspect of the apostle's life. 
Most of us know the feeling of unaccountable depression 
which rests upon us when we find ourselves alone in a foreign 
town, with its tide of population ebbing and flowing past us, 
a mass of human life, in which we ourselves are nothing. 
But that was St. Paul's daily existence. He had consecrated 
himself to an almost perpetual exile. He had given up the 
endearments of domestic life forever. Home, in this world, 
St. Paul had none. With a capacity for the tenderest feel- 
ings of our nature, he had chosen for his lot the task of living 
among strangers, and as soon as they ceased to be strangers, 
quitting them again. He went on month by month, attach- 
ing congregations to himself, and month by month dooming 
himself to severance. And yet I know not that we read of 
ono. single trace of depression or discouragement sufiered to 
rest on the apostle's mind. He seems to have been ever fresh 
and sanguine, the salient energy of his soul rising above the 
need of all human sympathy. It is the magnificent spectacle 
of missionary life, with more than missionary loneliness. 
There is something almost awful in the thought of a man 
who was so thoroughly in the next world that he needed not 
the consolations of this world. And yet, observe, there is 
nothing encouraging for us in this. It is very grand to look 
upon, very commanding, very full of awe ; but it is so much 
above us, so little like any thing human that we know of, 
that we content ourselves with gazing on him as on the glid- 
ing swallow's flight, which we wonder at, but never think of 
imitating. 

N'ow let us look at one other feature in St. Paul's character 
■ — his s iperiority to those temptations which are potent with 
ordinary men. We say nothing of his being above the love 
of money, of his indiflerence to a life of comfort and personal 
indulgence. Those temptations only assail the lower part of 
our nature, and it is not saintlincss to be above these : com- 
mon excellence is impossible otherwise. But when we come 
to look for those temptations which master the higher and 
the nobler man — ambition, jealousy, pride — it is not that we 
see them conquered by the apostle ; they scarcely seem to 



Christian Progress hy Oblivion of the Past, 5g 

have even lodged in his bosom at all. It was open to the 
apostle, if he had felt the ambition, to make for himself a 
name, to become the leader of a party in Corinth and in the 
world. And yet remember we not how sternly he put down 
the thought, and how he labored to merge his individuality in 
the cause, and make himself an equal of inferior men? 
" Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers, serv- 
ants, by whom ye believed ?" 

Again, in respect of jealousy. Jealousy seems almost in- 
separable from human love. It is but the other side of love, 
the shadow cast by the light when the darker body inter- 
venes. There came to him in prison that most cutting of all 
news to a minister's heart, that others were trying to sup- 
plant him in the affections of his converts. But his was that 
lofty love which cares less for reciprocation than for the well- 
being of the objects loved. The rival teachers were teach- 
ing from emulation ; still they could not but bless by preach- 
ing Christ to his disciples. " What then ? N'otwithstanding 
every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is preach- 
ed ; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice." There 
is not a trace of jealousy in these words. 

Once more : Degrading things were laid to his charge. 
The most liberal-minded of mankind was charged with big- 
otry. The most generous of men was suspected of avarice. 
If ever pride were venial, it had been then. Yet read through 
the whole of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, and say 
if one spark of pride be visible. He might have shut himself 
up in high and dignified silence. He might have refused to 
condescend to solicit a renewal of the love which had once 
grown cold ; and yet we look in vain for the symptoms of 
offended pride. Take this one passage as a specimen : " Be- 
hold, this third time I am willing to come unto you ; . . . . 
and I will very gladly spend and be spent for you, though 
the more abundantly I love you, the less I am beloved." 

In this there is very little encouragement. A man so 
thoroughly above human resentment, human passions, human 
weakness, does not seem to us an example. The nearer Hu- 
manity approaches a perfect standard, the less does it com* 
mand our sympathy. A man must be weak before we can 
feel encouraged to attempt what he has done. It is not the 
Redeemer's sinlessness, nor His unconquerable fidelity to 
duty, nor His superhuman nobleness, that win our desire to 
imitate. Rather His tears at the grave of friendship, Hia 
shrinking from the sharpness of death, and the feeling of hu- 
man doubt which swept across His soul like a desolation, 
These make Him one of us, and therefore our example. 



6o Christian Progress by' Oblivion of the Past. 

And it is on this account that this passage seems to us so 
full of encouragement. It is the precious picture of a frail 
and struggling apostle— precious both to the man and to the 
minister. To the man, because it tells him that what he feels 
St. Paul felt, imperfect, feeble, far from what he would wish 
to be; yet with sanguine hope, expecting progress in the 
saintly life. Precious to the minister, because it tells him 
that his very weakness may be subservient to a people's 
strength. Not in his transcendent gifts — not in his saintly 
endowments — not even in his apostolic devotedness, is St. 
Paul so close to our hearts, as when he makes himself one 
with us, and says, " Brethren, I count not myself to have ap- 
prehended." 

And we know not how otherwise any minister could hope 
to do good when he addresses men who are infinitely his su- 
periors in almost every thing. We know not how else he 
could urge on to a sanctity which he has not himself attained: 
w^e know not how he could dare to speak severely of weak- 
nesses by which he himself is overpowered, and passions of 
wiiich he feels in himself all the terrible tyranny, if it were 
not that he expects to have tacitly understood that in his 
own case which the apostle urged in every form of expres- 
sion : Brethren, be as I am, for I am as ye are — struggling, 
baffled, but panting for emancipation. 

We confine ourselves to two subjects: 

I. The apostle's object in this life. 
II. The means which he used for attaining it. 

I. The apostle's object or aim in this life was " perfection.'* 
In the verse before — " Not as though I had already attained, 
either were already perfect." — Perfection was his unreached 
mark. 

And less than this no Christian can aim at. There are 
given to us " exceeding great and precious promises," that by 
means of these we might be partakers of the Divine Nature. 
Not merely to be equal to the standard of our day, nor even 
to surpass it. Not to be superior to the men amongst whom 
^e live. Not to forgive those who have little to be forgiven. 
Kot to love our friends, but to be the children of our Father 
• — to be pure even as Christ is pure — to be " perfect even as 
*ur Father which is in heaven is perfect." 

It is easily perceivable why this perfection is unattainable 
in this life. Faultlessness is conceivable, being merely the 
negation of evil. But perfection is positive, the attainment 
of all conceivable excellence. It is long as eternity — expan- 
sive as God. Perfection is our mark: yet never will the 



Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past. 6 1 

aim be so true and steady as to strike the golden centre. 
Perfection of character, yet, even to the dying hour, it will 
be but this, "I count not myself to have apprehended." 
Christian life is like those questions in mathematics which 
never can be exactly answered. All you can attain is an ap- 
proximation to the truth. You may labor on for years and 
never reach it ; yet your labor is not in vain. Every figure 
you add makes the fraction nearer than the last to the million- 
millionth ; and so it is with holiness. Christ is our mark — 
the perfect standard of God in Christ. But be as holy as 
you will, there is a step nearer, and another, and another, and 
so infinitely on. 

To this object the apostle gave himself with singleness of 
aim. " This one thing I do^ The life of man is a va- 
grant, changeful desultoriness ; like that of children sporting 
on an enamelled meadow, chasing now a painted butterfly, 
which loses its charm by being caught— now a wreath of 
mist, which falls damp upon the hand with disappointment — 
now a feather of thistle-down, which is crushed in the grasp. 
In the midst of all this fickleness, St. Paul had found a pur- 
pose to which he gave the undivided energy of his soul. 
"This one thing I do — I press towards the mark." 

This is intelligible enough in the case of a minister; for 
whether he be in the pulpit or beside a sick man's bed — or 
furnishing his mind in the study, evidently and unmistakably 
it is his profession to be doing only one thing. But in the 
manifold life of the man of the world and business, it is not 
so easy to understand how this can be carried out. To an- 
swer this, we observe there is a difierence between doing and 
being. Perfection is being, not doing ; it is not to efiect an 
act, but to achieve a character. If the aim of life were to do 
something, then, as in an earthly business, except in doing 
this one thing the business would be at a stand-still. The 
student is not doing the one thing of student life when he 
has ceased to think or read. The laborer leaves his work 
undone when the spade is not in his hand, and he sits beneath 
the hedge to rest. But in Christian life, every moment and 
every act is an opportunity for doing the one thing, of he- 
coming Christ-like. Every day is full of a most impressive 
experience. Every temptation to evil temper which can as- 
sail us to-day will be an opportunity to decide the question 
whether we shall gain the calmness and the rest of Christ, or 
whether we shall be tossed by the restlessness and agitation 
of the world. Nay, the very vicissitudes of the seasons, day 
and night, heat and cold, affecting us variably, and producini^ 
exhilaration or depression, are so contrived as to conduce U*- 



62 Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past, 

wards the being which we become, and decide whether we 
shall be masters of ourselves, or whether we shall be swept at 
the mercy of accident and circumstance, miserably suscepti- 
ble of merely outward influences. Infinite as are the vari< 
eties of life, so manifold are the paths to saintly character ; 
and he who has not found out how directly or indirectly to 
make every thing converge towards his soul's sanctification, 
has as yet missed the meaning of this life. 

In pressing towards this '' mark," the apostle attained a 
prize; and here I ofler an observation, which is not one of 
mere subtlety of refinement, but deeply practical. The mark 
was perfection of character, the prize was blessedness. But 
the apostle did not aim at the prize of blessedness, he aimed 
at the mark of perfectness. In becoming perfect he attained 
happiness, but his primary aim was not happiness. 

We may understand this by an illustration. In student- 
life there are those who seek knowledge for its own sake, and 
there are those who seek it for the sake of the prize, and the 
honor, and the subsequent success in life that knowledge 
brings. To those who seek knowledge for its own sake the 
labor is itself reward. Attainment is the highest reward. 
Doubtless the prize stimulates exertion ; encourages and 
forms a part of the motive, but only a subordinate one : and 
knowledge Avould still have " a price above rubies," if there 
were no prize at all. They who seek knowledge for the sake 
of a prize are not genuine lovers of knowledge — thej^ only 
love the rewards of knowledge : had it no honor or substan- 
tial advantage connected with it, they would be indolent. 

Applying this to our subject, I say this is a spurious good- 
ness which is good for the sake of reward. The child th'at 
speaks truth for the sake of the praise of truth, is not truth 
ful. The man who is honest because honesty is the best pol 
icy, lias not integrity in his heart. He who endeavors to be 
humble, and holy, and perfect, in order to win heaven, has 
only a counterfeit religion. God for His own sake — Good- 
ness because it is good — Truth because it is lovely — this 
is the Christian's aim. The prize is only an incentive; insep- 
arable from success, but not the aim itself 

With this limitation, however, we remark that it is a Chris- 
tian duty to dwell much more on the thought of future bless- 
edness than most men do. If ever the apostle's step began 
to flag, the radiant diadem before him gave new vigor to his 
heart, and we know how at the close of his career the vision 
became more vivid and more entrancing. " Henceforth there 
is laid up for me a crown of glory !" It is our privilege, if 
we are on our way to God, to kec}) steadily before us tlia 



Christian Progress by Obliviov of the Past, 6 



o 



thought of home. Make it a matter of habit. Force your- 
self at night, alone, in the midst of the world's bright sights, 
to pause to think of the heaven which is yours. Let it calm 
you and ennoble you, and give you cheerfulness to endure 
It was so that Moses was enabled to live amongst all the fas- 
cinations of his courtly life, Avith a heart unseduced from his 
laborious destiny. By faith ..." esteeming the reproach of 
Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt." Whyf 
" For he had respect unto the recompense of the reward." It 
was so that our Master strengthened his human soul for its 
sharp earthly endurance. " For the joy that was set before 
him. He endured the cross, despising the shame." If we 
would become heavenly-minded, we must let the imagination 
realize the blessedness to which we are moving on. Let us 
think much of rest — the rest which is not of indolence, but of 
powers in perfect equilibrium. The rest which is deep as 
summer midnight, yet full of life and force as summer sun- 
shine, the sabbath of eternity. Let us think of the love of 
God, which we shall feel in its full tide upon our souls. Let 
us think of that marvellous career of sublime occupation 
which shall belong to the spirits of just men made perfect ; 
when we shall fill a higher place in God's universe, and more 
consciously, and with more distinct insight, co-operate with 
God in the rule over His Creation. "I press towards the 
mark — for the prize." 

H. We pass to our second topic. The means which St. 
Paul found available for the attainment of Divine and per- 
fect character. His great principle was to " forget the things 
which were behind, and to reach forward to the things which 
were before." The wisdom of a divine life lies hid in this 
principle. I shall endeavor to expand the sentiment to make 
it intelligible. 

What are the things behind, which are to be forgotten ? 

1. If we would progress in Christian life, we must forget 
the days of innocence that lie behind us. Let not this be 
misunderstood. Innocent, literally, no man ever is. We 
come into the world with tendencies to evil; but there was 
a time in our lives when those were only tendencies. A 
proneness to sin we had ; but we had not yet sinned. The 
moment had not yet arrived when that cloud settles down 
upon the heart, which in all of after-life is never entirely re* 
moved: the sense of guilt, the anguish of lost innocence, the 
restless feeling of a heart no longer pure. Popularly, we call 
that innocence ; and when men become bitterly aware that 
early innocence of heart is gone, they feel as if all were lost, 



04 Christian Progress Oy Oblivion of the Past 

ana so look back to what they reckon holier days with a per 
culiar fondness of regret. I believe there is much that ia 
merely feeble and sentimental in this regret. Our early in- 
nocence IS nothing more than ignorance of evil. Christian 
life is not a retaining of that ignorance of evil, nor even a re- 
turning of it again. We lose our mere negative sinlessness. 
We put on a firm manly holiness. Human innocence is not 
to know evil ; Christian saintliness is to know evil and good, 
and prefer good. It is possible for a parent, with over-fas- 
tidious refinement, to prolong the duration of this innocence 
unnaturally. He may lock up his library, and prevent the 
entrance to forbidden books; he may exercise a jealous cen- 
sorship over every book and every companion that comes into 
the house; he may remove the public journal from the table, 
lest an eye may chance to rest upon the contaminating por- 
tion of its pages ; but he has only put off the evil hour. He 
has sent into the world a young man of eighteen or twenty, 
ignorant of evil as a child, but not innocent as an angel who 
abhors the evil. No ; we can not get back our past igno- 
rance, neither is it desirable we should. No sane mind wish- 
es for that which is impossible. And it is no more to be re- 
gretted than the blossom is to be regretted when fruit is 
hardening in its place ; no more to be regretted than the 
slender gracefulness of the sapling, when you have got in- 
stead the woody fibre of the heart of oak of which the ship 
is made ; no more to be regretted than the green blade when 
the ear has come instead, bending down in yellow ripeness. 
Our innocence is gone, withered with the business-like con- 
tact with the great world. It is one of the things behind. 
Forget it. It was worth very little. And now for some- 
thing of a texture more firm, more enduring. We will not 
mourn over the loss of simplicity, if we have got instead 
souls indurated by experience, disciplined, even by fall, to 
refuse the evil and to choose the good. 

2. In the next place, it is wise to forget our days of youth. 
Up to a certain period of life it is the tendency of man to 
look forward. There is a marvellous prodigality with which 
we throw away our present happiness when we are young, 
which belongs to those who feel that they are rich in happi- 
ness, and never expect to be bankrupts. It almost seems 
one of the signatures of our immortality that we squande? 
time as if there were a dim consciousness that we are in pos- 
session of an eternity of it ; but as we arrive at middle age, 
it is the tendency of man to look back. 

To a man of middle life, existence is no longer a dream^ 
but a reality. He has not much more new to look forward 



Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past. 65 

to, for the character of his life is generally fixed by that 
time. His profession, his home, his occupations, will be for 
the most part what they are now. He will make few new 
acquaintances — no new friends. It is the solemn thought 
connected with middle age that life's last business is begun 
in earnest ; and it is then, midway between the cradle and 
the grave, that a man begins to look back and marvel with a 
kind of remorseful feeling that he let the days of youth go by 
so half enjoyed. It is the pensive autumn feeling — it is the 
sensation of half sadness that we experience when the long- 
est day of the year is past, and every day that follows is 
shorter, and the lights fainter, and the feebler shadows tell 
that nature is hastening with gigantic footsteps to her win- 
ter grave. So does man look back upon his youth. When 
the first gray hairs become visible — when the unwelcome 
truth fastens itself upon the mind that a man is no longer 
going up the hill, but down, and that the sun is already west- 
ering, he looks back on things behind. Now this is a nat- 
ural feeling, but is it the high Christian tone of feeling ? In 
the spirit of this verse, we may assuredly answer. No. We 
who have an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and 
that fadeth not away, what have we to do with things past? 
When we were children, we thought as children. But now 
there lies before us manhood, with its earnest work ; and 
then old age, and then the grave, and then home. 

And so manhood in the Christian life is a better thing 
than boyhood, because it is a riper thing ; and old age ought 
to be a brighter, and a calmer, and a more serene thing than 
manhood. There is a second youth for man, better and holi- 
er than his first, if he will look on and not back. There is a 
peculiar simplicity of heart and a touching singleness of pur- 
pose in Christian old age, which has ripened gradually and 
not fitfully. It is then that to the wisdom of the serpent is 
added the harmlessness of the dove ; it is then that to the 
firmness of manhood is joined almost the gentleness of wom- 
anhood ; it is then that the somewhat austere and sour char- 
acter of growing strength, moral and intellectual, mellows 
into the rich ripeness of an old age made sweet and tolerant 
by experience ; it is then that man returns to first principles. 
There comes a love more pure and deep than the boy could 
ever feel ; there comes a conviction, with a strength beyond 
that which the boy could never know, that the earliest lesson 
of life is infinite, Christ is all. 

3. Again, it is wise to forget past errors. There is a kind 
of temperament which, when indulged, greatly hinders growth 
in real godliness. It is that rueful, repentant, self-accusing 
c 



66 Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past, 

temper which is always looking back, and microscopically ol> 
serving how that which is done might have been better done. 
Something of this we ought to have. A Christian ought to 
feel always that he has partially failed, but that ought not 
to be the only feeling. Faith ought ever to be a sanguine, 
cheerful thing ; and perhaps in practical life we could not 
give a better account of faith than by saying that it is, 
amidst much failure, having the heart to try again. Our 
best deeds are marked by imperfection ; but if they really 
were our best, " forget the things that are behind " — we shall 
do better next time. 

Under this head we include all those mistakes which be- 
long to our circumstances. We can all look back to past life 
and see mistakes that have been made, to a certain extent 
perhaps, irreparable ones. We can see w^here our education 
was fatally misdirected. The profession chosen for you per- 
haps was not the fittest, or you are out of place, and many 
things might have been better ordered. Now on this apos- 
tolic principle it is wise to forget all that. It is not by re- 
gretting w^hat is irreparable that true work is to be done, 
but by making the best of what we are. It is not by com- 
plaining that w^e have not the right tools, but by using well 
the tools we have. What we are, and where we are, is God's 
providential arrangement — God's doing, though it may be 
man's misdoing ; and the manly and the wise way is to look 
your disadvantages in the face, and see what can be made out 
of them. Life, like war, is a series of mistakes, and he is not 
the best Christian nor the best general who makes the few- 
est false steps. Poor mediocrity may secure that ; but he 
is the best who wins the most splendid victories by the re- 
trieval of mistakes. Forget mistakes : organize victory out 
of mistakes. 

Finally, past guilt lies behind us, and is w^ell forgotten. 
There is a way in w^hich even sin may be banished from the 
memory. If a man looks forw^ard to the evil he is going to 
commit, and satisfies himself that it is inevitable, and so 
treats it lightly, he is acting as a fatalist. But if a man par- 
tially does this, looking backward, feeling that sin when it 
is past has become part of the history of God's universe, and 
is not to be wept over forever, he only does that which the 
Giver of the Gospel permits him to do. Bad as the results 
iiave been in the w^orld of making light of sin, those of brood- 
ing over it too much have been worse. Remorse has done 
more harm than even hardihood. It was remoi-se w^hich 
fixed Judas in an unalterable destiny ; it was remorse which 
filled the monasteries for ages with men and women whose 



Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past, 67 

fives became useless to their fellow-creatures ; it is remorse 
which so remembers by-gone faults as to paralyze the ener- 
gies for doing Christ's work ; for when you break a Chris- 
tian's spirit, it is all over with progress. Oh, we want every 
thing that is hopeful and encouraging for our work, for God 
knows it is not an easy one. And therefore it is that the 
Gospel comes to the guiltiest of us all at the very outset with 
the inspiring news of pardon. You remember how Christ 
treated sin. Sin of oppression and hypocrisy indignantly, 
but sin of frailty — " ' Hath no man condemned thee ?' ' No 
man. Lord.' ' Neither do I condemn thee ; go, and sin no 
more.' " As if he would bid us think more of what we may 
be than of what we have been. 

There was the wisdom of life in the proverb with which 
the widow of Tekoah pleaded for the restoration of Absalom 
from banishment before David. Absalom had slain his 
brother Amnon. Well, Amnon was dead before his time ; 
but the severity of revenge could never bring him back 
again. " We must all die," said the wise woman, " and are 
as water spilt upon the ground, which can not be gathered 
up again." Christian brethren, do not stop too long to weep 
over spilt water. Forget your guilt, and wait to see what 
eternity has to say to it. You have other work to do now. 

So let us work out the spirit of the apostle's plan. Inno- 
cence^ youth, success, error, guilt — let us forget them all. 

Not backward are our glances bent, 
But onward to our Father's home. 

In conclusion, remember Christian progress is only possi' 
ble in Christ. It is a very lofty thing to be a Christian ; for 
a Christian is a man who is restoring God's likeness to his 
character ; and therefore the apostle calls it here a high call- 
ing. High as heaven is the callmg wherewith we are called. 
But this very height makes it seem impracticable. It is nat- 
ural to say, All that was well enough for one so transcend- 
ently gifted as Paul to hope for : but I am no gifted man ; 
I have no iron strength of mind ; I have no sanguine hope- 
fulness of character ; I am disposed to look on the dark side 
of things ; I am undetermined, weak, vacillating ; and then 
I have a whole army of passions and follies to contend with. 
We have to remind such men of one thing they have forgot- 
ten. It is the high calling of God, if you will ; but it is the 
high calling of God in Christ Jesus. What the world calls 
virtue is a name and a dream without Christ. The founda- 
tion of all human excellence must be laid deep in the blood 
of the Redeemer's cross, and in the power of His Resurrec- 



68 Triumph over Hindrances. 

tion. First let a man know that all his past is wrong and 
sinful; then let him fix his eye on the love of God in Christ 
loving him — even him, the guilty one. Is there no strength 
in that — no power in the knowledge that ail that is gone by 
is gone^ and that a fresh, clear future is open ? It is not the 
progress of virtue that God asks for, but progress in saintli- 
ness, empowered b) hope and love. 

Lastly, let each man put this question to himself, " Dare 
I look on ?" With an earnest Christian, it is " reaching 
forth to those things which are before." Progress ever. 
And then just as we go to rest in this world tired, and wake 
up fresh and vigorous in the morning, so does the Christian 
go to sleep in the world's night, weary with the work of 
life, and then on the resurrection-day he wakes in his second 
and his brighter morning. It is well for a believer to look 
on. Dare you ? Remember, out of Christ, it is not wisdom, 
but madness to look on. You must look back, for the long- 
est and the best day is either past or passing. It will be 
winter soon — desolate, uncheered, hopeless, winter — old age, 
with its dreariness and its disappointments, and its queru- 
lous broken-heartedness ; and there is no second spring for 
you — no resurrection-morning of blessedness to dawn on the 
darkness of your grave. God has only one method of salva- 
tion, the Cross of Christ. God can have only one ; for the 
Cross of Christ means death to evil, life to good. There is 
no other way to salvation but that ; for that in itself is, and 
alone is, salvation. Oui of Christ, therefore, it is woe to the 
man who reaches forth to the things which are before. To 
such I say ; My unhappy brethren. Omnipotence itself can 
not change the darkness of your destiny. 



TRIUMPH OVER HINDRA:N^CES— ZACCHEUS. 

' " And Zaccheus stood, and said unto the Lord ; Behold, Lord, the half of 
my goods I give to the poor ; and if I have taken any thing from any man 
by false accusation, I restore him fourfold," — Luke xix. 8. 

There are persons to whom a religious life seems smooth 
and easy. Gifted by God constitutionally with a freedom 
from those inclinations which in other men are tyrannous 
and irresistible, endued with those aspirations which other 
men seem to lack, it appears as if they were born saints. 



Triumph over Hindrances, 69 

There are others to whom it is all a trial — a whole world 
of passions keep up strife within. The name of the spirit 
which possesses them is Legion. It is a hard fight from 
the cradle to the grave — up-hill work — toil all the way ; 
and at the last it seems as if they had only just kept their 
ground. 

There are circumstances which seem as if intended as a 
very hot-bed for the culture of religious principle, in which 
the difficulty appears to be to escape being religious. 

There are others in which religious life seems impossible. 
For the soul, tested by temptation, is like iron tried by 
weights. No iron bar is absolutely infrangible. Its 
strength is tested by the weight w^hich it will bear without 
breaking. No soul is absolutely impeccable. It seems as if 
all we can dare to ask even of the holiest is how much temp- 
tation he can bear without giving way. There are societies 
amidst which some are forced to dwell daily, in which the 
very idea of Christian rest is negatived. There are occupa- 
tions in which purity of heart can scarcely be conceived. 
There are temptations to which some are subjected in a long 
series, in which to have stood upright would have demand- 
ed not a man's but an angel's strength. 

Here are two cases : one in which temperament and cir- 
cumstances are favorable to religion ; another in which both 
are adverse. If life were always the brighter side of these 
pictures, the need of Christian instruction and Christian 
casuistry — i. e., the direction for conduct under various sup- 
posable cases, would be superseded. The end of the institu- 
tion of a Church would be gone ; for the Church exists for 
the purposes of mutual sympathy and mutual support. But 
the fact is, life is for the most part a path of varied trial. 
How to lead the life divine, surrounded by temptations 
from within and from without — how to breathe freely the 
atmosphere of heaven, while the feet yet touch earth — 
how to lead the life of Christ, who shrunk from no scene 
of trying duty, and took the temptations of man's life as 
they came — or how even to lead the ordinary saintly life, 
winning experience from fall, and permanent strength out 
of momentary weakness, and victory out of defeat, this is 
the problem. 

The possibility of such a life is guaranteed by the history 
of Zaccheus. Zaccheus was tempted much, and yet Zacche- 
us contrived to be a servant of Christ. If we wanted a mot- 
to to prefix to this story, we should append this : The suc- 
cessful pursuit of religion under difficulties. 

These, then, are the two branches of our thoughts to-day; 



70 Triumph over Hindrances. 

I. The hindrances to a religions life. 
n. The Christian triumph over difficulties. 

I. The hindrances of Zaccheus were twofold : partly cir- 
cumstantial — partly personal. Partly circumstantial, arising 
from his riches and his profession of a publican. 

Now the publican's profession exposed him to temptations 
in these three ways. First of all, in the way of opportunity, 
A publican was a gatherer of the Roman public imposts. 
Not, however, as now, when all is fixed, and the Government 
pays the gatherer of the taxes. The Roman publican paid 
so much to the Government for the privilege of collecting 
them, and then indemnified himself, and appropriated what 
overplus he could, from the taxes which he gathered. There 
was, therefore, evidently a temptation to overcharge, and a 
temptation to oppress. To overcharge, because the only re- 
dress the payer of the taxes had was an appeal to law, in 
which his chance was small before a tribunal where the 
judge was a Roman, and the accuser an official of the Ro- 
man Government. A temptation to oppress, because the 
threat of law was nearly certain to extort a bribe. Be- 
sides this, most of us must have remarked that a certain 
harshness of manner is contracted by those who have the 
rule over the poor. They come in contact with human souls 
only in the way of business. They have to do with their ig- 
norance, their stupidity, their attempts to deceive ; and hence 
the tenderest-hearted men become impatient and apparently 
unfeeling. Hard men, knowing that redress is difficult, be- 
come harder still, and exercise their authority with the inso- 
lence of office ; so that, when to the insolence of office and 
the likelihood of impunity there was superadded the pecu- 
niary advantage annexed to a tyrannical extortion, any one 
may understand how great the publican's temptation was. 

Another temptation was presented : to live satisfied with 
a low morality. The standard of right and wrong is eternal 
in the heavens — unchangeably one and the same. But here 
on earth it is perpetually variable — it is one in one age or 
nation, another in another. Every profession has its conven- 
tional morality, current nowhere else. That which is per- 
mitted by the peculiar standard of truth acknowledged at 
the bar is falsehood among plain men ; that which would be 
reckoned in the army purity and tenderness would be else- 
where licentiousness and cruelty. There is a parliamentary 
honor quite distinct from honor between man and man. 
Trade has its honesty, which rightly named is fraud. And 
in all these cases the temptation is to live content with tlio 



Triumph over Hindrances, 7 1 

standard of a man's own profession or society ; and this ia 
the real difference between the worldly man and the relig- 
ious man. He is the worldling who lives below that stand- 
ard, or no higher ; he is the servant of God who lives above 
his age. But you will perceive that amongst publicans a 
very little w^ould count much — that which would be laxity 
to a Jew and shame to a Pharisee, might be reckoned very 
strict morality among the Publicans. 

Again, Zaccheus was tempted to that hardness in evil 
which comes from having no character to support. But the 
extent to which sin hardens depends partly on the estimate 
taken of it by society. The falsehood of Abraham, the guilt 
and violence of David, were very different in their effect on 
character in an age w^hen truth and purity and gentleness 
were scarcely recognized, from what they w^ould be now. 
Then Abraham and David had not so sinned against their 
consciences as a man would sin now in doing the same acts, 
because their consciences were less enlightened. A man might 
be a slave-trader in the Western hemisphere, and in other re- 
spects a humane, upright, honorable man. In the last cen- 
tury, the holy Newton of Olney trafficked in slaves after be- 
coming religious. A man who had dealings in this w^ay in 
this country could not remain upright and honorable, even if 
it were conceivable that he began as such ; because he would 
either conceal from the world his share in the traffic, and so, 
doing it secretly, would become a hypocrite, or else he must 
cover his wickedness by effrontery, doing it in defiance of 
public shame, and so getting seared in conscience. Because 
in the one case, the sin remaining sin, yet countenanced b} 
society, does not degrade the man nor injure his conscience 
even to the same extent to which it would ruin the other, 
whose conscience must become seared by defiance of public 
shame. It is scarcely possible to unite together the idea of 
an executioner of public justice and a humble, holy man. 
And yet assuredly, not from any thing that there is unlaw- 
ful in the office ; an executioner's trade is as lawful as a sol- 
dier's. A soldier is placed there by his country to slay his 
country's enemies, and a doomster is placed there to slay 
the transgressors of his country's laws. Wherein lies the dif 
ference which leaves the one a man of honor, and almost ne- 
cessitates the other to be taken from the rank of reprobates, 
or else gradually to become such ? Simply the difference of 
public opinion — public scorn. Once there was no shame in 
the office of the executioner, and the judge of Israel, with his 
own hands, hewed Agag to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal. 
Phineas executed summary and sanguinary vengeance, and 



72 Triumph over Hindrances. 

his iiame has been preserved in a hymn by his country's 
gratitude. The whole congregation became executioners in 
the case of blasphemy, and no abandonment was the result. 
But the voice of public opinion pronouncing an office or a 
man scandalous, either finds jr else makes them what it has 
pronounced them. The executioner iii or becomes an out- 
cast, because reckoned such. 

More vile and more degraded than even the executioner's 
office with us was the office of publican among the Jews. A 
penitent publican could not go to the house of God without 
the risk of hearing muttered near him the sanctimonious 
thanksgiving of Pharisaism : " God, I thank Thee that I am 
not as this publican." A publican, even though high in of- 
fice, and rich besides, could not receive into his house a teach- 
er of religion without being saluted by the murmurs of the 
crowd, as in this case : " He is gone to eat with a man that 
is a sinner." A sinner ! The proof of that ? The only proof 
was that he was a publican. There are men and women in 
this congregation who have committed sins that never have 
been published to the world ; and therefore, though they be 
still untouched by the love of God, they have never sunk 
down to degradation ; whereas the very same sins, branded 
with public shame, have sunk others not worse than them 
down to the lowest infamy. There is no principle in educa- 
tion and in life more sure than this — to stigmatize is to ruin ; 
to take away character is to take away all. There is no 
power committed to man, capable of use and abuse, more cer- 
tain and more awful than this : " Whose soever sins ye remit, 
they are remitted unto them." 

This, then, was a temptation arising put of Zaccheus's cir- 
cumstances — to become quite hardened by having no char- 
acter to support. 

The personal hindrance to a religious life lay in the rec- 
ollection of past guilt. Zaccheus had done wrong, and 
no four-fold restitution will undo that where only remorse 
exists. 

There is a difference between remorse and penitence. Re- 
morse is the consciousness of wrong-doing with no sense of 
love. Penitence is that same consciousness, with the feeling 
of tenderness and gratefulness added. 

And pernicious as have been the consequences of self-right- 
eousness, more destructive still have been the consequences 
of remorse. If self-righteousness has slain its thousands, re- 
morse has slain its tens of thousands ; for, indisputably, self- 
righteousness secures a man from degradation. Have yon 
never wondered at the sure walk of those persons who, to trust 



Triumph over Hindrances, 73 

to their own estimate of themselves, are always right ? They 
never sin, their children are better brought up than any other 
children, their conduct is irreproachable. Pride saves them 
from a fall. That element of self-respect, healthful always, is 
their safeguard. Yes, the Pharisee was right. He is not an 
extortioner, nor unjust, and he is regular in his payments and 
his duties. That was self-righteousness: it kept him from 
samtliness, but it saved him from degradation too. Remorse, 
on the contrary, crushes. If a man lose the world's respect, 
he can retreat back upon the consciousness of the God with- 
in. But if a man lose his own respect, he sinks down and 
down, and deeper yet, until he can get it back again by feel- 
ing that he is sublimely loved, and he dares at last to respect 
that which God vouchsafes to care for. Remorse is like the 
clog of an insoluble debt. The debtor is proverbially ex- 
travagant — one more, and one more expense. What can it 
matter when the great bankruptcy is near ? And so, in the 
same way one sin, and one more. Why not? why should 
he pause when all is hopeless? what is one added to that 
which is already infinite ? 

Past guilt becomes a hindrance too in another way — it 
makes fresh sin easier. Let any one, out of a series of trans- 
gressions, compare the character of the first and the last. 
The first time there was the shudder and the horror, and the 
violent struggle, and the feeling of impossibility. I can not 
— can not do that. The second time there was faint reluc- 
tance, made more faint by the recollection of the facility and 
the pleasantness of the first transgression, and the last time 
there is neither shudder nor reluctance, but the eager plunge 
down the precipice on the brink of which he trembled once. 
All this was against Zaccheus. A publican had lost self-re- 
spect, and sin was therefore easy. 

II. Pass we on to the triumph over difficulties. In this 
there is man's part, and God's part. 

Man's part in Zaccheus's case was exhibited in the discov- 
ery of expedients. The Redeemer came to Jericho, and Zac- 
cheus desired to see that blessed countenance, whose very 
looks, he was told, shed peace upon restless spirits and fever- 
ed hearts. But Zaccheus was small of stature, and a crowd 
surrounded him. Therefore he ran before, and climbed up 
into a sycamore-tree. You must not look on this as a mere 
act of curiosity. They who thronged the steps of Jesus were 
a crowd formed of different materials from the crowd which 
would have been found in the amphitheatre. He was there 
as a religious teacher or prophet; and they who took pains to 



74 Triumph over Hindrances, 

see Him, at least were the men who looked for salvation it 
Israel, This, therefore, was a religious act. 

We have heard of the " pursuit of knowledge under diflS- 
culties." The shepherd, with no apparatus besides his thread 
and beads, has lain on his back, on the starry night, mapped 
the heavens, and unconsciously become a distinguished as- 
tronomer. The peasant-boy, with no tools but his rude knife, 
and a visit now and then to the neighboring town, has begun 
his scientific education by producing a watch that would 
mark the time. The blind man, trampling upon impossibili- 
ties, has explored the economy of the bee-hive, and, more 
wondrous still, lectured on the laws of light. The timid 
stammerer, with pebbles in his mouth, and the roar of the sea- 
surge in his ear, has attained correctest elocution, and sway- 
ed as one man the changeful tides of the mighty masses of 
the Athenian democracy. All these were expedients. It ia 
thus in the life religious. No man ever trod exactly the 
path that others trod before him. There is no exact chart 
laid down for the voyage. The rocks and quicksands are 
shifting. He who enters upon the ocean of existence arches 
his sails to an untried breeze. He is " the first that ever 
burst into that lonely sea." Every life is a new life. Ev- 
ery day is a new day — like nothing that ever went before, 
or can ever follow after. No books — no systems — no fore- 
cast — set of rules, can provide for all cases ; every case is a 
new case. And just as in any earthly enterprize, the conduct 
of a campaign, or the building of a bridge, unforeseen diffi- 
Bulties and unexpected disasters must be met by that inex- 
haustible fertility of invention which belongs to those who do 
not live to God second-hand. We must live to God first- 
hand. If we are in earnest, as Zaccheus was, we must invent 
peculiar means of getting over peculiar difficulties. 

There are times when the truest courage is shown in re- 
treating from a temptation. There are times when, not be- 
ing on a level with other men in qualifications of temper, 
mind, character, we must compensate by inventions and 
Christian expedients. You must climb over the crowd of 
difficulties which stand between your soul and Christ — you 
must " run before" and forecast trials, and get into the syca- 
more solitude. Without a living life like this, you will never 
get a glimpse of the King in his beauty ; you will never see 
Him. You will be just on the point of seeing Him, and yet 
be shut out by some unexpected hindrance. 

Observe again, an illustration of this : Zaccheus's habit of 
restoration. " Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to 
the poor ; and if I have taken any thing from any man bi 



Triumph over Hindrances, 75 

false accusation, I restore him fourfold." There are two ways 
of interpreting this ; it may have reference to the future. It 
commonly is so interpreted. It is supposed that, touched by 
the love of Christ, Zaccheus proclaimed this as his resolve — I 
hereby promise to give the hall of my goods to the poor. 
But it is likely that this interpretation has been put upon it 
in order to make it square with the evangelical order of emo- 
tions — grace first, liberality after. The interpretation seema 
rather put on the passage than found there. The word is 
not future, but singular : Behold, Lord, I give. And it seems 
more natural to take it as a statement of the habit of Zac- 
cheus's previous life. If so, then all is plain. This man, so 
maligned, had been leading a righteous life after all, accord- 
ing to the Mosaic standard. On the day of defense he stands 
forward and vindicates himself from the aspersion. "These 
are my habits." And the Son of Man vindicates him before 
all. Yes, publican as he is, he too is a " son of Abraham." 

Here, then, were expedients by which he overcame the hin- 
drances of his position. The tendency to the hardness and 
selfishness of riches he Checked by a rule of giving half away. 
The tendency to extortion he met by fastening on himself 
the recollection, that when the hot moment of temptation 
had passed away, he would be severely dealt with before the 
tribunal of his own conscience, and unrelentingly sentenced 
to restore fourfold. 

God^s part in this triumph over difficulties is exhibited in 
the address of Jesus: "Zaccheus, make haste and come 
down ; for to-day I must abide at thy house." 

Two things we note here : Invitation and Sympathy. In* 
vitation — " come down." Say what we will of Zaccheus 
seeking Jesus, the truth is, Jesus was seeking Zaccheus. 
For what other reason but the will of God had Jesus come 
to Jericho but to seek Zaccheus and such as he? Long 
years Zaccheus had been living in only a dim consciousness 
of being a servant of God and goodness. At last the Saviour 
is born into the world — appears in Judea — comes to Jericho, 
Zaccheus's town — passes down Zaccheus's street, and by 
Zaccheus's house, and up to Zaccheus's person. What is all 
this but seeking — what the Bible calls election ? Now there 
is a specimen in this of the ways of God with men in this 
world. We do not seek God — God seeks us. There is a 
Spirit pervading time and space who seeks the souls of men. 
At last the seeking becomes reciprocal — the Divine Presence 
is felt afar, and the soul begins to turn towards it. Then 
when we begin to seek God, we become conscious that God 
is seeking us. It is at that period that we distinguish the 



76 Triumph over Hindrances, 

voice of personal invitation — " Zaccheus !" It is then that 
the Eternal Presence makes its abode with us, and the hour 
of unutterable joy begins, when the banquet of Divine Love 
is spread within the soul, and the Son of God abides there as 
at a feast. " Behold, I stand at the door and knock : If any 
man hear my voice, I will come in and sup with him, and he 
with me." 

This is Divine Grace. We are saved by grace, not will. 
"It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but 
of God that showeth mercy." In the matter of man's salva- 
tion God is first. He comes to us self-invited — He names us 
by name — He isolates us from the crowd, and sheds upon us 
the sense of personal recognition — He pronounces the bene- 
diction, till we feel that there is a mysterious blessing on our 
house, and on our meal, and on our heart. *' This day is sal- 
vation come to this house, forasmuch as he also is a son of 
Abraham." 

Lastly, the Divine part was done in Sympathy. By sym- 
pathy we commonly mean little more than condolence. If 
the tear start readily at the voice of grief, and the purse- 
strings open at the accents of distress, we talk of a man's 
having great sympathy. To weep with those who weep : — 
common sympathy does not mean much more. 

The sympathy of Christ was something different from this. 
Sympathy to this extent, no doubt, Zaccheus could already 
command. If Zaccheus were sick, even a Pharisee would 
have given him medicine. If Zaccheus had been in need, a 
Jew would not have scrupled to bestow an alms. If Zac- 
cheus had been bereaved, many even of that crowd that mur- 
mured when they saw him treated by Christ like a son of 
Abraham would have given to his sorrow the tribute of a 
sigh. 

The sympathy of Jesus was fellow-feeling for all that is hu- 
man. He did not condole with Zaccheus upon his trials — 
He did not talk to him "about his soul" — He did not preach 
to him about his sins — He did not force his way into his house 
to lecture him — He simply said, "I will abide at thy house:" 
thereby identifying himself with a publican : thereby ac- 
knowledging a publican for a brother. Zaccheus a publican? 
Zaccheus a sinner? Yes; but Zaccheus is a man. His heart 
throbs at cutting words. He has a sense of human honor. 
He feels the burning shame of the world's disgrace. Lost? 
Yes: — but the Son of Man, with the blood of the human race 
in His veins, is a Brother to the lost. 

It is in this entire and perfect sympathy with all Humani- 
ty that the heart of Jesus differs from every other heart that 



Triumph over Hindrances, 7J7 

is found among the sons of men. And it is this — oh, it ia 
this, which is the chief blessedness of having such a Saviour. 
If you are poor you can only get a miserable sympathy from 
ihe rich ; with the best intentions they can not understand 
you. Their sympathy is awkward. If you are in pain, it is 
only a factitious and constrained sympathy you get from 
those in health — feelings forced, adopted kindly, but imper- 
feet still. They sit beside you, when the regular condolence 
is done, conversing on topics with each other that jar upon 
the ear. They sympathize ? Miserable comforters are they 
all. If you are miserable, and tell out your grief, you have 
the shame of feeling that you were not understood ; and that 
you have bared your inner self to a rude gaze. If you are in 
doubt, you can not tell your doubts to religious people ; no, 
not even to the ministers of Christ — for they have no place 
for doubts in their largest system. They ask. What right 
have you to doubt? They suspect your character. They 
shake the head ; and whisper it about gravely, that you read 
strange books — that you are verging on infidelity. If you 
are depressed with guilt, to whom shall you tell out your 
tale of shame ? The confessional, with its innumerable evils, 
and yet indisputably soothing power, is passed away ; and 
there is nothing to supply its place. You can not speak to 
your brother man, for you injure him by doing so, or else 
weaken yourself You can not tell it to society, for society 
judges in the gross, by general rules, and can not take into 
account the delicate differences of transgression. It banishes 
the frail penitent, and does homage to the daring hard trans- 
gressor. 

Then it is that, repulsed on all sides and lonely, we turn 
to Him whose mighty Heart understands and feels all. 
" Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of 
eternal life." And then it is that, exactly like Zaccheus, 
misunderstood, suspected by the world, suspected by our 
own hearts — the very voice of God apparently against us — 
isolated and apart, we speak to Him from the loneliness of 
the sycamore-tree, heart to heart, and pulse to pulse. 
" Lord, Thou knowest all things :" Thou knowest my se- 
cret charities, and my untold self-denials. " Thou knowest 
that I love thee." 

Remark, in conclusion, the power of this sympathy on 
Zaccheus's character. Salvation that day came to Zaccheus's 
house. What brought it ? What touched him? Of course, 
" the gospel." Yes ; but what is the gospel ? What waa 
his gospel? Speculations or revelations concerning the Di- 
vine Nature ? — the scheme of the atonement ? — or of the ia 



yS The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath, 

carnation ? — or baptismal regeneration ? Nay, but the Di 
vine sympathy of the Divinest Man. The personal love of 
God, manifested in the face of Jesus Christ. The floodgates 
of his soul were opened, and the whole force that was in the 
man flowed forth. Whichever way you take that expres- 
sion " Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the 
poor :" If it referred to the future, then, touched by unex- 
pected sympathy, finding himself no longer an outcast, he 
made that resolve in gratefulness. If to the past, then, still 
touched by sympathy, he who had never tried to vindicate 
himself before the world, was softened to tell out the tale of 
his secret munificence. This is what I have been doing all 
the time they slandered me, and none but God knew it. 

It required something to make a man like that talk of 
things which he had not sufifered his own left hand to know, 
before a scorning world. But, anyhow, it was the manifest- 
ed Fellowship cf the Son of Man which brought salvation to 
that house. 

Learn this : When we live the gospel so, and preach the 
gospel so, sinners will be brought to God. We know not 
yet the gospel power ; for who trusts, as Jesus did, all to 
that? Who ventures, as He did, upon the power of Love, 
in sanguine hopefulness of the most irreclaimable ? who 
makes that^ the divine humility of Christ, " the gospel ?" 
More than by eloquence, more than by accurate doctrine, 
more than by ecclesiastical order, more than by any doc- 
trine trusted to by the most earnest and holy men, shall we 
and others, sinful rebels, outcasts, be won to Christ by that 
central truth of all the Gospel — the entireness of the Redeem- 
er's sympathy. In other words, the Love of Jesus. 



VI. 

THE SHADOW AKD SUBSTANCE OF THE 
SABBATH. 

" Let no man, therefore, judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a 
•jolyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath-days : which are a shadow of 
Ihings to come; but the body is of Christ." — Col. ii. 16, 17. 

No sophistry of criticism can explain away the obvious 
meaning of these words. The apostle speaks of certain in- 
Btitutions as Jewish : shadowy : typical : and among these 
we are surprised to find the sabbath-days. It has been con- 
tended that there is here no allusion to the seventh day of 



The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath, 79 

rest, but only to certain Jewish holydays, not of Divine in- 
Btitution. But, in the first place, the " holydays " have been 
already named in the same verse; in the next we are con- 
vinced that no plain man, reading this verse for the first 
time, without a doctrine to support, would have put such an 
interpretation upon the word : and we may be sure that St. 
Paul would never have risked so certain a misconstruction 
of his words by the use of an ambiguous phrase. This, 
then, is the first thing we lay down — a very simple postu- 
late, one would think — when the apostle says the sabbath- 
days, he means the sabbath-days. 

Peculiar difficulties attend the discussion of the subject of 
the sabbath. If we take the strict and ultra ground of sab- 
bath observance, basing it on the rigorous requirements of 
the fourth commandment, we take ground which is not true ; 
and all untruth, whether it be an over-statement or a half- 
truth, recoils upon itself If we impose on men a burden 
which can not be borne, and demand a strictness which, pos- 
sible in theory, is impossible in practice, men recoil ; we have 
asked too much, and they give us nothing — the result is an 
open, wanton, and sarcastic desecration of the Day of Rest. 

If, on the other hand, we state the truth, that the sabbath 
is obsolete — a shadow which has passed — without modifica- 
tion or explanations, evidently there is a danger no less per- 
ilous. It is true to spiritual, false to unspiritual men ; and a 
wide door is opened for abuse. And to recklessly loosen the 
hold of a nation on the sanctity of the Lord's day would be 
most mischievous — to do so willfully would be an act almost 
diabolical. For if we must choose between Puritan over- 
precision on the one hand, and on the other that laxity 
which, in many parts of the Continent, has marked the day 
from other days only by more riotous worldliness, and a more 
entire abandonment of the whole community to amusement, 
no Christian would hesitate : no English Christian, at least ; 
to whom that day is hallowed by all that is endearing in 
early associations, and who feels how much it is the very 
bulwark of his country's moral purity. 

Here, however, as in other cases, it is the half-truth which 
is dangerous — the other half is the corrective ; the whole 
truth alone is safe. If we say the sabbath is shadow, this is 
only half the truth. The apostle adds, "the body is of 
Christ." 

There is, then, in the sabbath that which is shadowy and 
that which is substantial ; that which is transient and that 
which is permanent ; that which is temporal and typical, 
and that which is eteriiaL The shadow and the body. 



8o The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath, 

Hence, a very natural and simple division of our subject 
suggests itself. 

I. The transient shadow of the sabbath which has passed 
away. 

n. The permanent substance which can not pass. 

L The transient shadow which has passed away. 

The history of the sabbath-day is this. It was given by 
Moses to the Israelites, partly as a sign between God and 
them, marking them off from all other nations by its observ- 
ance ; partly as commemorative of their deliverance from 
Egypt. And the reason why the seventh day was fixed on, 
rather than the sixth or eighth was, that on that day God 
rested from His labor. The soul of man was to form itself 
on the model of the Spirit of God. It is not said, that God 
at the creation gave the sabbath to man, but that God rest- 
ed at the close of the six days of creation : whereupon he 
had blessed and sanctified the seventh day to the Israelites. 
This is stated in the fourth commandment, and also in Gen. i., 
which was written for the Israelites ; and the history of crea- 
tion naturally and appropriately introduces the reason and 
the sanction of their day of rest. 

Nor is there in the Old Testament a single trace of the 
observance of the sabbath before the time of Moses. After 
the Deluge, it is not mentioned in the covenant made with 
Noah. The first account of it occurs after the Israelites had 
left Egypt ; and the fourth commandment consolidates it 
into a law, and explains the principle and sanctions of the 
institution. The observance of one day in seven, therefore, 
is purely Jewish. The Jewish obligation to observe it rest- 
ed on the enactment given by Moses. 

The spirit of its observance, too, is Jewish, and not Chris- 
tian. There is a difference between the spirit of Judaism 
and that of Christianity. The spirit of Judaism is separa- 
tion — that of Christianity is permeation. To separate the 
evil from the good was the aim and work of Judaism : — to 
sever one nation from all other nations ; certain meats from 
other meat ; certain days from other days. Sanctify means 
to set apart. The very essence of the idea of Hebrew holi- 
ness lay in sanctification in the sense of separation. On the 
contrary, Christianity is permeation — it permeates all evil 
with good — it aims at overcoming evil by good — it desires 
to transfuse the spirit of the day of rest into all other days, 
and to spread the holiness of one nation over all the world. 
To saturate life with God, and the world with Heaven, that 
is the genius of Christianity. 



The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath, 8 1 

Accordingly, the observance of the sabbath was entirely 
in the Jewish spirit. No fire was permitted to be made on 
pain of death : Exod. xxxv. 3. No food was to be prepared : 
xvi. 5, 23. No buying nor selling : Nehem. x. 31. So rigor- 
ously was all this carried out, that a man gathering sticks 
was arraigned before the congregation, and sentenced to 
death by Moses. 

This is Jewish, typical, shadowy ; — it is all to pass away. 
Much already has passed: even those who believe our 
Lord's day to be the descendant of the sabbath admit this. 
The day is changed. The first day of the week has taken 
the place of the seventh. The computation of hours is al- 
tered. The Jews reckoned from sunset to sunset — modern 
Christians reckon from midnight to midnight. The spirit 
of its observance, too, is altered. No one contends now for 
Jewish strictness in its details. 

Now observe, all this implies the abrogation of a great 
deal more — nay, of the whole Jewish sabbath itself. We 
have altered the day — the computation of the hours — the 
mode of observance : What remains to keep ? Absolutely 
nothing of the literal portion except one day in seven : and 
that is abrogated, if the rest be abrogated. For by what 
right do we say that the order of the day, whether it be the 
first or the seventh, is a matter of indiflerence, because only 
formal, but that the proportion of days, one in seven, instead 
of one in eight or nine, is moral and unalterable ? On what 
intelligible principle do we produce the fourth command- 
ment as binding upon Christians, and abrogate so important 
a clause of it as, " In it thou shalt do no manner of work ?" 
On what self-evident ground is it shown that the Jew might 
not light a fire, but the Christian may ; yet that if the postal 
arrangements of a country permit the delivery of a letter, it 
is an infraction of the sabbath ? 

Unquestionably on no scriptural authority. Let those 
who demand a strict observance of the letter of scripture re- 
member that the Jewish sabbath is distinctly enforced in 
the Bible, and nowhere in the Bible repealed. You have 
changed the seventh day to the first on no clear scriptural 
permission. Two or three passages tell us that, after the 
Kesurrection, the apostles were found together on the first 
day of the week (which, by-the-way, may have been Satur* 
day evening after sunset)., But it is concluded that there- 
fore probably the change was apostolic. You have only a 
probability to go on — and that probability, except with the 
aid of tradition, infinitesimally small — for the abrogation of 
a single iota of the Jewish fourth commandment. 



82 The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath, 

It will be said, however, that works of necessity and works 
of mercy are excepted by Christ's example. 

Tell us, then, ye who are servants of the letter, and yet do 
not scruple to use a carriage to convey you to some church 
where a favorite minister is heard, is that a spiritual necessi- 
ty or a spiritual luxury ? Part of the Sunday meal of all of 
you is the result of a servant's work. Tell us, then, ye ac- 
curate logicians, who say that nothing escapes the rigor of* 
the prohibition which is not necessary or merciful, is a hot 
repast a work of necessity or a work of mercy ? Oh ! it 
rouses in every true soul a deep and earnest indignation to 
hear men who drive their cattle to church on Sundays, be- 
cause they are too emasculated to trudge through cold and 
rain on foot, invoke the severity of an insulted Law of the 
Decalogue on those who provide facilities of movement for 
such as can not afford the luxury of a carriage. What 
think you, would He who blighted the Pharisees with such 
burning words, have said, had He been present by, while 
men, whose servants clean their houses, and prepare their 
meals, and harness their horses, stand up to denounce the 
service on some railway by which the poor are helped to 
health and enjoyment ? Hired service for the rich is a ne- 
cessity — hired service for the poor is a desecration of the 
sabbath ! It is right that a thousand should toil for the few 
in private ! It is past bearing in a Christian country that a 
few should toil for thousands on the sabbath-day ! 

There is only this alternative : if the fourth command- 
ment be binding still, that clause is unrepealed — "no man- 
ner of work ;" and so, too, is that other important part, the 
sanctification of the seventh day and not the first. If the 
fourth commandment be not binding in these points, then 
there is nothing left but the broad, comprehens/ve ground 
taken by the apostle. The whole sabbath is a shadow of 
things to come. In consistency, either hold that none of the 
formal part is abrogated, or else all. The whole of the let- 
ter of the commandment is moral, or else none. 

H- There is, however, in the sabbath a substance, a per- 
manent something — " a body " — which can not pass away. 

" The body is of Christ;" the spirit of Christ is the fulfill- 
ment of the law. To have the spirit of Christ is to have ful- 
filled the law. Let us hear the mind of Christ in this mat- 
ter. " The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sab- 
bath." In that principle, rightly understood, lies the clue 
for the unravelling of the whole matter. The religionists 
of that day maintained that the necessities of man's natur« 



The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath. Z'^^ 

must give way to the rigor of the enactment: — He taught 
that the enactment must yield to man's necessities. They 
said that the sabbath was written in the book of the Law ; 
He said that it was written on man's nature, and that the 
law was merely meant to be in accordance with that nature. 
They based the obligation to observe the sabbath on the sa- 
credness of an enactment ; He on the sacredness of the na- 
ture of man. 

An illustration will help us to perceive the difference be- 
tween these two views. A wise physician prescribes a regi- 
men of diet to a palate which has become diseased : he fixes 
what shall be eaten, the quantity, the hours, and number of 
times. On what does the obligation to obey rest ? On the 
arbitrary authority of the physician ? or on the nature with 
which that prescription is in accordance ? When soundness 
and health are restored, the prescription falls into disuse : 
but the nature remains unalterable, which has made some 
things nutritious, others unwholesome, and excess forever 
pernicious. Thus the spirit of the prescription may be still 
in force when the prescriptive authority is repealed. 

So Moses prescribed the sabbath to a nation spiritually 
diseased. He gave the regimen of rest to men who did not 
feel the need of spiritual rest. He fenced round his rule 
with precise regulations of details — one day in seven, no 
work, no fire, no traffic. On what does the obligation to 
obey it rest ? On the authority of the rule ? or on the ne- 
cessities of that nature for which the rule was divinely 
adapted ? Was man made for the sabbath, to obey it as a 
slave ? or. Was the sabbath made for man ? And when 
spiritual health has been restored, the Law regulating the 
details of rest may become obsolete ; but the nature which 
demands rest never can be reversed. 

Observe, now, that this is a far grander, safer, and more 
permanent basis on which to rest the sabbath than the mere 
enactment. For if you allege the fourth commandment as 
your authority, straightway you are met by the objection 
" no manner of work." Who gave you leave to alter that ? 
And if you reply, works of necessity and works of mercy I 
may do, for Christ excepted these from the stringency of the 
rule, again the rejoinder comes, is there one in ten of the 
things that all Christians permit as lawful really a matter 
of necessity? 

Whereas, if the sabbath rest on the needs of human na- 
ture, and we accept His decision that the sabbath was made 
for man^ then you have an eternal ground to rest on from 
which you can not be shaken. A son of man may be lord 



84 The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath, 

of the sabbath-day, but he is not lord of his own nature. 
He can not make one hair white or black. You may abro* 
gate the formal rule, but you can not abrogate the needs of 
your own souL Eternal as the constitution of the soul of 
man is the necessity for the existence of a day of rest. 
Further still, on this ground alone can you find an impreg- 
nable defense of the proportion^ one day in seven : — on the 
other ground it is unsafe. Having altered the seventh to 
the first, I know not why one in seven might not be altered 
to one in ten. The thing, however, has been tried ; and by 
the necessities of human nature the change has been found 
pernicious. One day in ten, prescribed by revolutionary 
France, was actually pronounced by physiologists insuffi- 
cient. So that we begin to find that, in a deeper sense 
than we at first suspected, " the sabbath was made for man." 
Even in the contrivance of one day in seven, it was arranged 
by unerring wisdom. Just because the sabbath was made for 
man, and not because man was ordained to keep the sabbath- 
day, you can not tamper even with the iota, one day in seven. 

That necessity on which the observance leans is the need 
of rest. It is the deepest want in the soul of man. If you 
take off" covering after covering of the nature which wraps 
him round, till you come to the central heart of hearts, deep 
lodged there you find the requirement of repose. All men 
do not hanker after pleasure — all men do not crave intel- 
lectual food. But all men long for rest ; the most restless 
that ever pursued a turbulent career on earth did by that 
career only testify to the need of the soul within. They 
craved for something which was not given : there was a 
thirst which was not slaked : that very restlessness be- 
tokened that — restless because not at rest. It is this need 
which sometimes makes the quiet of the grave an object of 
such deep desire. " There the wicked cease from troubling, 
and there the weary are at rest." It is this which creates 
the chief desirableness of heaven : " There remaineth a rest 
for the people of God." And it is this which, consciously or 
unconsciously, is the real wish that lies at the bottom of all 
others. Oh ! for tranquillity of heart — heaven's profound 
silence in the soul, " a meek and quiet spirit, which in the 
sight of God is of great price !" 

The rest needed by man is twofold. Physical repose of 
the body — a need which he shares with the animals through 
the lower nature which he has in common with them. 
" Thou shalt do no work, nor thy cattle," — so far man's 
sabbath-need places him only on a level with the ox and 
with the ass. 



The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath, 85 

But, besides this, the rest demanded is a repose of spirit. 
Between these two kinds of rest there is a very important 
difference. Bodily repose is simply inaction : the rest of the 
Boui is exercise, not torpor. To do nothing is physical rest 
— to be engaged in full activity is the rest of the soul. 

In that hour, which of all the twenty-four is most emblem- 
atical of heaven, and suggestive of repose, the eventide, in 
which instinctively Isaac went into the fields to meditate — 
when the work of the day is done, when the mind has ceased 
its tension, when the passions are lulled to rest in spite of 
themselves, by the spell of the quiet star-lit sky — it is then, 
amidst the silence of the lull of all the lower parts of our 
nature, that the soul comes forth to do its work. Then the 
peculiar, strange work of the soul, which the intellect can 
not do — meditation, begins. Awe, and worship, and wonder 
are in full exercise ; and Love begins then in its purest form 
of mystic adoration and pervasive and undefined tenderness 
— separate from all that is coarse and earthly — swelling as 
if it would embrace the All in its desire to bless, and lose it- 
self in the sea of the love of God. This is the rest of the 
soul — the exercise and play of all the nobler powers. 

Two things are suggested by this thought. 

First, the mode of the observance of the day of rest. It 
has become lately a subject of very considerable attention. 
Physiologists have demonstrated the necessity of cessation 
from toil : they have urged the impossibility of perpetual oc- 
cupation without end. Pictures, with much pathos in them, 
have been placed before us, describing the hard fate of those 
on whom no sabbath dawns. It has been demanded as a 
right, entreated as a mercy, on behalf of the laboring man, 
that he should have one day in seven for recreation of his 
bodily energies. All well and true. But there is a great 
deal more tban this. He who confines his conception of the 
need of rest to that, has left man on a level with the brutes. 
Let a man take merely lax and liberal notions of the fourth 
commandment — let him give his household and dependents 
immunity from toil, and wish for himself and them no more — 
he will find that there is a something wanting still. Experi- 
ence tells us, after a trial, that those Sundays are the hap- 
piest, the purest, the most rich in blessing, in which the 
spiritual part has been most attended to — those in which the 
business letter was put aside till evening, and the profane 
literature not opened, and the ordinary occupations entirely 
suspended — those in which, as in the temple of Solomon, 
the sound of the earthly hammer has not been heard in the 
temple of the soul : for this is, in fact, the very distinction be* 



86 The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath, 

tween the spirit of the Jewish sabbath and the spirit of the 
Christian Lord's day. The one is chiefly for the body— 
" Thou shalt do no manner of work." The other is princi- 
pally for the soul — " I was in the spirit on the Lord's day." 

The other truth suggested by that fact, that the repose of 
the soul is exercise, not rest, is, that it conveys an intimation 
of man's immortality. It is only when all the rest of our hu- 
man nature is calmed that the spirit comes forth in full ener- 
gy: all the rest tires, the spirit never tires. Humbleness, 
awe, adoration, love, these have in them no weariness : so 
that when this frame shall be dissolved into the dust of the 
earth, and the mind, which is merely fitted for this time- 
world, learning by experience, shall have been superseded, 
then, in the opening out of an endless career of love, the 
spirit will enter upon that sabbath of which all earthly sab- 
baths are but the shadow — the sabbath of eternity, the im- 
mortal rest of its Father's home. 

Two observations, in concluding. 

1. When is a son of man lord of the sabbath-day? To 
whom may the sabbath safely become a shadow ? I reply, 
he that has the mind of Christ may exercise discretionary 
lordship over the sabbath-day. He who is in possession of 
the substance may let the shadow go. A man in health has 
done with the prescriptions of the physician. But for an un- 
spiritual man to regulate his hours and amount of rest by his 
desires, is just as preposterous as for an unhealthy man to 
rule his appetites by his sensations. Win the mind of Christ ; 
be like Him ; and then, in the reality of rest in God, the sab- 
bath form of rest will be superseded. Remain apart from 
Christ, and then you are under the law again ; the fourth 
commandment is as necessary for you as it was for the Is- 
raelite — the prescriptive regimen which may discipline your 
soul to a sounder state. It is at his peril that the worldly 
man departs from the rule of the day of rest. Nothing can 
make us free from the law but the Spirit. 

2. The rule pronounced by the apostle is a rule of liberty, 
and at the same time a rule of charity : " Let no man judge 
you in respect of the sabbath-days." It is very diflicult to 
discuss this question of the sabbath. Heat, vehemence, acri- 
mony, are substituted for argument. When you calmly ask 
to investigate the subject, men apply epithets, and call them 
reasons : they stigmatize you as a breaker of the sabbath, 
pronounce you " dangerous," with sundry warnings against 
you in private, and pregnant hints in public. 

The apostle urges charity: "One man estecmeth one day 
above another : another man esteemeth every day alike." . . . 



The Shaaow and Substance of the Sabbath, 87 

••He that regardeth the day, regardeth it to the Lord; and 
he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he regardeth 
it not." Carry out that spirit. In the detail of this question 
there is abundant difficulty. It is a question of degree. 
Some work must be done on the sabbath-day: — some must 
sacrifice their rest to the rest of others ; for all human life is 
sacrifice, voluntary or involuntary. 

Again, that which is rest to one man is not rest to another. 
,To require the illiterate man to read his Bible for some hours 
would impose a toil upon him, though it might be a relaxa- 
tion to you. To the laboring man a larger proportion of the 
day must be given to the recreation of his physical nature 
than is necessary for the man of leisure, to whom the spirit- 
ual observance of the day is easy, and seems all. Let us 
learn large, charitable considerateness. Let not the poor 
man sneer at his richer neighbor, if, in the exercise of his 
Christian liberty, he uses his horses to convey him to church 
and not to the mere drive of pleasure ; but then, in fairness, 
let not the rich man be shocked and scandalized if the over- 
wearied shopkeeper and artisan breathe the fresh air of heav- 
en with their families in the country. "The sabbath was 
made for man." Be generous, consistent, large-minded. A 
man may hold stifi*, precise Jewish notions on this subject, 
but do not stigmatize that man as a formalist. Another may 
hold large, Paul-like views of the abrogation of the fourth 
commandment, and yet he may be sincerely and zealously 
anxious for the hallowing of the day in his household and 
through his country. Do not call that man a sabbath-break- 
er. Remember, the Pharisees called the Son of God a sab- 
bath-breaker. They kept the law of the sabbath, they broke 
the law of love. Which was the worst to break ? which was 
the higb<^r law to keep ? Take care lest, in the zeal which 
seems tc> you to be for Christ, ye be found indulging their 
spirit. Arid not His. 



88 The Sympathy of Christ. 



vn. 
THE SYMPATHY OF CHRIST. 

** For we have not a high-priest which can not be touched with the feeling 
of our infirmities ; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without 
sin. Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may ob- 
tain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need." — Heb. iv. 15, 16. 

According to these verses, the priesthood of Jesus Christ 
is based upon the perfection of His humanity. Because 
tempted in all points like as we are, therefore He can show 
mercy, and grant help. Whatever destroys the conception 
of His humanity does in that same degree overthrow the no- 
tion of His priesthood. 

Our subject is the Priestly Sympathies of Christ. But we 
make three preliminary observations. 

The perfection of Christ's humanity implies that He was 
possessed of a human soul as well as a human body. There 
was a view held in early times, and condemned by the 
Church as a heresy, according to which the body of Christ 
was an external framework animated by Deity, as our bodies 
are animated by our souls. What the soul is to us, Deity 
was to Christ. His body was flesh, blood, bones — moved, 
guided, ruled by indwelling Divinity. 

But you perceive at once that this destroys the notion of 
complete humanity. It is not this tabernacle of material ele- 
ments which constitutes our humanity: you can not take 
that pale corpse from which life has fled, and call that man. 
And if Deity were to take up that form and make it its 
abode, that would not be a union of the Divine and Human. 
It would only be the union of Deity with certain materials 
that might have passed into man, or into an animal or an 
herb. Humanity implies a body and a soul. 
^ Accordingly, in the life of Christ we find two distinct 
classes of feeling. When He hungered in the wilderness — 
when He thirsted on the cross — when He was weary by the 
well at Sychar — He experienced sensations which belong to 
the bodily department of human nature. But when out of 
twelve He selected one to be His bosom friend — when He 
looked round upon the crowd in anger — when the tears 
streamed down His cheeks at Bethany — and when He recoil- 
ed from the thought of approaching dissolution : — these— 



The Sympathy of Christ. 89 

grief, friendship, fear — were not the sensations of the body, 
much less were they the attributes of Godhead. They were 
the affections of an acutely sensitive human soul, alive to all 
the tenderness, and hopes, and anguish with which human 
life is filled, qualifying Him to be tempted in all points like as 
we are. 

The second thought which presents itself is, that the Ke- 
'deemer not only was, but is man. He was tempted in all 
points like us. He is a high-priest which can be touched. 
Our conceptions on this subject, from being vague, are often 
very erroneous. It is fancied that in the history of Jesus's 
existence, once, for a limited period and for definite purposes, 
He took part in frail humanity ; but that when that purpose 
was accomplished, the Man forever perished, and the Spirit 
reascended, to unite again with pure unmixed Deity. But 
Scripture has taken peculiar pains to give assurance of the 
continuance of His humanity. It has carefully recorded His 
resurrection. After that He passed through space from spot 
to spot : when He was in one place He was not in another. 
His body was sustained by the ordinary aliments — broiled 
fish and honeycomb. The prints of suffering were on Him. 
His recognitions were human still. Thomas and Peter were 
especially reminded of incidents before His death, and con- 
nected with His living interests. To Thomas He says — 
" Reach hither thy hand." To Peter—" Lovest thou me ?" 

And this typifies to us a very grand and important truth. 
It is this, if I may venture so to express myself — the truth of 
the human heart of God. We think of God as a Spirit, in- 
finitely removed from and unlike the creatures He has made. 
But the truth is, man resembles God : all spirits, all minds, 
are of the same family. The Father bears a likeness to the 
Son whom He has created. The mind of God is similar to 
the mind of man. Love does not mean one thing in man, and 
another thing in God. Holiness, justice, pity, tenderness — 
these are in the Eternal the same in kind which they are in 
the finite being. The present manhood of Christ conveys 
this deeply important truth, that the Divine heart is human 
in its sympathies. 

The third observation upon these verses is, that there is a 
connection between what Jesus was and what Jesus is. He 
can be touched now, because. He was tempted then. The in- 
cidents and the feelings of that part of the existence which 
is gone have not passed away without results which are doep 
ly entwined with His present being. His past experience haa 
left certain effects durable in His nature as it is now. It haa 
endued Him with certain qualifications and certain suscepti- 



90 The Sympathy of Christ, 

bilities, which He would not have had but for that expert^ 
ence. Just as the results remained upon His body, the prints 
of the nails in His palms, and the spear-gash in His side, so 
do the results remain upon His soul, enduing Him with a cer- 
tain susceptibility, for " He can be touched with the feeling of 
our infirmities ;" with certain qualifications, for " He is able 
!to show mercy, and to impart grace to help in time of need." 
To turn now to the subject itself. It has two branches. 

I. The Redeemer's preparation for His priesthood. 
H. The Redeemer's priestly qualifications. 

I. His preparation. The preparation consisted in being 
tempted. But here a difficulty arises. Temptation, as ap- 
plied to a Being perfectly free from tendencies to evil, is not 
easy to understand. See what the difficulty is. Temptation 
has two senses: It means test or probation; it means also 
trial, involving the idea of pain or danger. A common acid 
applied to gold tests it, but there is no risk or danger to the 
most delicate golden ornament. There is one acid, and only 
one, which tries it, as well as tests it. The same acid applied 
to a shell endangers the delicacy of its surface. A weight 
hung from a bar of iron only tests its strength ; the same, 
depending from a human arm, is a trial, involving, it may be, 
the risk of pain or fracture. Now trial placed before a sin- 
less being is intelligible enough in the sense of probation — it 
is a test of excellence : but it is not easy to see how it can be 
temptation in the sense of pain, if there be no inclination to 
do wrong. 

However, Scripture plainly asserts this as the character of 
Christ's temptation. Not merely test, but trial. 

First, you have passages declaring the immaculate nature 
of His mind — as here, " without sin." Again, He was " holy, 
harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners." And again, " The 
prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me." Thf 
spirit of evil found nothing w^hich it could claim as its own in 
Christ. It was the meeting of two elements which wdll not 
amalgamate. Oil and water could as easily blend, as the 
mind of Christ with evil. Temptation glanced from His 
heart as the steel point does from the surface of the diamond. 
It was not that evil propensities were kept under by the pow' 
er of the Spirit in Him : — He had no evil propensities at all. 
Obedience was natural to Him. 

But then we find another class of passages such as this : 
" He suffered, being tempted." There was not merely test in 
the temptation, but there was also painfiihicss in the victory. 
How could this be without any tendency to evil ? 



The Sympathy of ChiHst gi 

To answer this, let us analyze sin. In every act of sin 
there are two distinct steps : There is the rising of a desire 
which is natural, and, being natural, is not wrong : there is 
the indulgence of that desire in forbidden circumstances ; and 
that is sin. Let injury, for example, be inflicted, and resent- 
ment will arise. It must arise spontaneously. It is as im 
possible for injustice to be done, and resentment not to fol 
low, as it is for the flesh not to quiver on the application oi 
intense torture. Resentment is but the sense of injustice, 
made more vivid by its being brought home to ourselves; 
resentment is beyond our control, so far. There is no sin in 
this: but let resentment rest there; let it pass into, not jus- 
tice, but revenge ; let it smoulder in vindictive feeling till it 
becomes retaliation, and then a natural feeling has grown 
into a transgression. You have the distinction between these 
two things clearly marked in Scripture. " Be ye angry " — 
here is the allowance for the human, " and sin not " — here is 
the point where resentment passes into retaliation. 

Again, take the natural sensation of hunger. Let a man 
have been without food : let the gratification present itself, 
and the natural desire will arise involuntarily. It will arise 
just as certainly in a forbidden as in a permitted circum- 
stance. It will arise whether what he looks on be the bread 
of another or his own. And it is not here, in the sensation 
of hunger, that the guilt lies. But it lies in the willful grat- 
ification of it after it is known to be forbidden. 

This was literally one of the cases in which Christ was 
tried. The wish for food was in His nature in the wilderness. 
The very mode of gratifying it was presented to His imagina- 
tion, by using Divine power in an unlawful way. And had He 
so been constituted that the lower wish was superior to the 
higher will, there would have been an act of sin ; had the 
two been nearly balanced, so that the conflict hung in doubt, 
there would have been a tendency to sin: what we call a sin- 
ful nature. But it was in the entire and perfect subjugation 
of desire to the will of right that a sinless nature was ex- 
hibited. 

Here then is the nature of sin. Sin is not the possession of 
desires, but the having them in uncontrolled ascendency over 
the higher nature. Sinfulness does not consist in having 
strong desires or passions : in the strongest and highest na- 
tures, all, including the desires, is strong. Sin is not a real 
thing. It is rather the absence of a something, the will to do 
right. It is not a disease or taint, an actual substance pro- 
jected into the constitution. It is the absence of the spirit 
which orders and harmonizes the whole j so that what we 



92 The Sympathy of Christ. 

mean when we say the natural man must sin inevitably, \\ 
this, that he has strong natural appetites, and that he has no 
bias from above to counteract those appetites : exactly as if 
a ship were deserted by the crew, and left on the bosom of 
the Atlantic with every sail set and the wind blowing. No 
one forces her to destruction, yet on the rocks she will surely 
go, just because there is no pilot at the helm. Such is the 
state of ordinary men. Temptation leads to fall. The gusts 
of instincts, which rightly guided would have carried safely 
into port, dash them on the rocks. No one forces them to 
sin ; but the spirit-pilot has left the helm. — [Fallen Nature.] 

Sin, therefore, is not in the appetites, but in the absence of 
a controlling will. 

Now contrast this state with the state of Christ. There 
were in Him all the natural appetites of mind and body. 
Relaxation and friendship were dear to Him — so were sun- 
light and life. Hunger, pain, death — He could feel all, and 
shrunk from them. Conceive, then, a case in which the grat- 
ification of any one of these inclinations was inconsistent 
with His Father's will. At one moment it was unlawful to 
eat, though hungry : and without one tendency to disobey, 
did fasting cease to be severe ? It was demanded that he 
should endure anguish ; and willingly as He subdued Him- 
self, did pain cease to be pain ? Could the spirit of obedi- 
ence reverse every feeling in human nature ? When the 
brave man gives his shattered arm to the surgeon's knife, 
will may prevent even the quiver of an eyelid, but no will 
and no courage can reverse his sensations, or prevent the op- 
eration from inflicting pain. When the heart is raw, and 
smarting from recent bereavement, let there be the deepest 
and most reverential submission to the highest Will, is it 
possible not to wince? Can any cant demand for submission 
extort the profession that pain is pleasure ? 

It seems to have been in this way that the temptation of 
Christ caused suffering. He suffered from the force of de- 
sire. Though there was no hesitation whether to obey or 
not, no strife in the will, in the act of mastery there was 
pain. There was self-denial — there was obedience at the 
expense of tortured natural feeling. He shrunk from St. 
Peter's suggestion of escape from ignominy as from a thing 
which did not shake His determination, but made Him feel, 
in the idea of bright life, vividly the cost of His resolve. 
" Get thee behind me, tempter, for thou art an offense." In 
the garden, unswervingly, " Not as I will, but as Thou wilt." 
There was no reluctance in the icill. But was there na 
struggling — no shudder in the inward sensations — no r^ 



The Sympathy of Christ. 93 

memb ranee that the Cross was sharp — no recollection of the 
family at Bethany, and the pleasant walk, and the dear com- 
panionship which He was about to leave ? " My soul is ex- 
ceeding sorrowful to die." .... 

So that in every one of these cases — not by the reluctancy 
of a sinful sensation, but by the quivering and the anguish- 
of natural feeling when it is trampled upon by lofty will — 
Jesus suffered^ being tempted. He was " tempted like as we 
aie." Remember this. For the way in which some speak 
of the sinlessuess of Jesus reduces all His suffering to phys- 
ical pain, destroys the reality of temptation, reduces that 
glorious heart to a pretense, and converts the whole of His 
history into a mere fictitious drama, in which scenes of trial 
were only represented, not really felt. Remember that, " in 
all points," the Redeemer's soul was tempted. 

n. The second point we take is the Redeemer's priesthood. 

Priesthood is that office by which He is the medium of 
union between man and God. The capacity for this has 
been indelibly engraven on His nature by His experience 
here. All this capacity is based on His sympathy : He can 
be " touched with the feeling of our infirmities." 

Till we have reflected on it, we are scarcely aware how 
much the sum of human happiness in the world is indebted 
to this one feeling — sympathy. We get cheerfulness and 
vigor, we scarcely know how or when, from mere associa^ 
tion with our fellow-men ; and from the looks reflected on 
us of gladness and employment, we catch inspiration and 
power to go on, from human presence and from cheerful 
looks. The workman works with added energy from having 
others by. The full family circle has a strength and a life 
peculiarly its own. The substantial good and the effectual 
relief which men extend to one another is trifling. It is not 
by these, but by something far less costly, that the work is 
done. God has insured it by a much more simple machinery. 
He has given to the weakest and the poorest, power to con- 
tribute largely to the common stock of gladness. The 
child's smile and laugh are mighty powers in this world. 
When bereavement has left you desolate, what substantial 
benefit is there which makes condolence acceptable? It 
can not replace the loved ones you have lost. It can bestow 
upon you nothing permanent. But a warm hand has 
touched yours, and its thrill told you that there was a liv- 
ing response there to your emotion. One look, one human 
sigh has done mora for vou than the costliest present could 
convey. 



94 The Sympathy of Christ. 

And it is for want of remarking this that the effect of 
public charity falls often so far short of the expectations of 
those who give. The springs of men's generosity are dried 
up by hearing of the repining, and the envy, and the discon- 
tent which have been sown by the general collection and the 
provision establishment, among cottages where all was har« 
mony before. The famine and the pestilence are met by 
abundant liberality ; and the apparent return for this is riot 
and sedition. But the secret lies all in this. It is not in 
channels such as these that the heart's gratitude can flow. 
Love is not bought by money, but by love. There has been 
all the machinery of a public distribution : but there has 
been no exhibition of individual, personal interest. The 
rich man who goes to his poor brother's cottage, and without 
affectation of humility, naturally, and with the respect which 
man owes to man, enters into his circumstances, inquiring 
about his distresses, and hears his homely tale, has done 
more to establish an interchange of kindly feeling than he 
could have secured by the costliest present by itself Pub- 
lic donations have their value and their uses. Poor-laws 
keep human beings from starvation : but in the point of 
eliciting gratitude, all these fail. Man has not been brought 
into contact close enough with man for this. They do not 
work by sympathy. 

Again, when the electric touch of sympathetic feeling has 
gone among a mass of men, it communicates itself, and is 
reflected back from every individual in the crowd, with a 
force exactly proportioned to their numbers. The speech or 
sermon read before the limited circle of a family, and the 
same discourse uttered befoi-e closely crowded hundreds, are 
two different things. There is strange power even in the 
mere presence of a common crowd, exciting almost uncon- 
trollable emotion. 

It is on record that the hard heart of an Oriental conquer- 
or was unmanned by the sight of a dense mass of living mil- 
lions engaged in one enterprise. He accounted for it by say- 
ing that it suggested to him that within a single century 
not one of those millions would be alive. But the hard- 
hearted bosom of the tyrant mistook its own emotions ; his 
tears came from no such far-fetched inference of reflection : 
they rose spontaneously, as they will rise in a dense crowd, 
you can not tell why. It is the thrilling thought of numbers 
engaged in the same object. It is the idea of our own feel- 
ings reciprocated back to us, and reflected from many hearts. 
It is the mighty presence of life. 

And again, it seems partly to avail itself of this tendency 



The Sympathy of Christ. 95 

within us that such stress is laid on the injunction of united 
prayer. Private devotion is essential to the spiritual life — 
without it there is no life. But it can not replace united 
prayer, for the two things have different aims. Solitary 
prayer is feeble in comparison with that which rises before 
the throne echoed by the hearts of hundreds, and strength- 
ened by the feeling that other aspirations are mingling with 
our own. And whether it be the chanted litany, or the 
more simply read service, or the anthem producing one emo- 
tion at the same moment in many bosoms, the value and the 
power of public prayer seem chiefly to depend on this mys- 
terious affection of our nature — sympathy. 

And now, having endeavored to illustrate this power of 
sympathy, it is for us to remember that of this in its fullness 
He is susceptible. There is a vague way of speaking of the 
Atonement w^hich does not realize the tender, affectionate, 
personal love by which that daily, hourly reconciliation is 
effected. The sympathy of Christ was not merely love of 
men in masses : He loved the masses, but he loved them 
because made up of individuals. He "had compassion ou 
the multitude ;" but He had also discriminating, special ten- 
derness for erring Peter and erring Thomas. He felt for the 
despised lonely Zaccheus in his sycamore-tree. He compas- 
sionated the discomfort of His disciples. He mixed His 
tears with the stifled sobs by the grave of Lazarus. He 
called the abashed children to His side. Amongst the num- 
bers, as He walked. He detected the individual touch of 
faith. "Master, the multitude throng thee, and sayest thou, 
Who touched me?" — " Somebody hath touched me." 

Observe how he is touched by our infirmities — with a sep- 
arate, special, discriminating love. There is not a single 
throb, in a single human bosom, that does not thrill at once 
with more than electric speed up to the mighty heart of God. 
You have not shed a tear or sighed a sigh that did not 
come back to you exalted and purified by having passed 
through the Eternal bosom. 

The priestly powers conveyed by this faculty of sympa- 
thizing, according to the text are two : the power of mercy, 
and the power of having grace to help. " Therefore " — be- 
icause He can be touched — '*" let us come boldly," expecting 
mercy — and grace. 

1. We may boldly expect mercy from Him who has learaed 
to sympathize. He learned sympathy by being tempted : 
but it is by being tempted, yet without sin, that He is spe« 
cially able to show mercy. 

There are two who are aiifit for showing mercy : He who 



96 The Sympathy of Christ 

has never been tried; and he who, having been tempted, ha* 
fallen under temptation. The young, untempted, and up- 
right, are often severe judges. They are for sanguinary pun- 
ishment : they are for expelling offenders from the bosom 
of society. The old, on the contrary, who have fallen much, 
are lenient ; but it is a leniency which often talks thus : Men 
must be men — a young man must sow his wild oats and re- 
form. 

So young ardent Saul, untried by doubt, persecuted the 
Christians with severity; and Saul the king, on the contrary, 
having fallen himself, weakly permitted Agag to escape pun- 
ishment. David, again, when his own sin was narrated to 
him under another name, was unrelenting in his indignation: 
" The man that hath done this thing shall surely die." 

None of these were qualified for showing mercy aright. 
Kow this qualification " Avithout sin " is very remarkable : 
for it is the one we often least should think of Unthinking- 
ly we should say that to have erred would make a man leni- 
ent : it is not so. 

That truth is taught with deep significance in one of the 
incidents of the Redeemer's life. There stood in His pres- 
ence a tempted woman, covered with the confusion of recent 
conviction. And there stood beside her the sanctimonious 
religionists of that day, waiting like hell-hounds to be let 
loose upon their prey. Calm words came from the lips of 
Him "who spake as man never spake," and whose heart 
felt as man never felt. " He that is without sin among you 
let him first cast a stone." A memorable lesson of eternal 
truth. Sinners are not fit to judge of sin : their justice is re- 
venge — their mercy is feebleness. He alone can judge of 
sin — he alone can attemper the sense of what is due to the 
ofiended law with the remembrance of that which is due to 
human frailty — he alone is fit for showing manly mercy, who 
has, like his Master, felt the power of temptation in its 
might, and come scathless through the trial. "In all points 
tempted — yet without sin /" therefore, to Him you may 
"boldly go to find mercy." 

2. The other priestly power is the grace of showing " help 
in time of need." 

We must not make too much of sympathy, as mere feeling. 
We do in things spiritual as we do with hot-house plants. 
The feeble exotic, beautiful to look at, but useless, has costly 
pums spent on it. The hardy oak, a nation's strength, is per- 
mitted to grow, scarcely observed, in the fence and copses. 
We prize feeling and j^raise its possessor. But feeling is 
only a sickly exotic in itself— a passive quality, having in it 



The Sympathy of Christ. ^7 

oothing moral, no temptation and no victory. A man i& no 
more a good man for having feeling, than he is for having a 
delicate ear for music, or a far-seeing optic nerve. The Son 
of man had feeling — He could be " touched." The tear 
would start from His eyes at the sight of human sorrow. 
But that sympathy was no exot'.c in His soul, beautiful to 
look at, too delicate for use. Feeling with Him led to this, 
" He went about doing good." Sympathy with Him was this, 
'' Grace to help in time of need." 

And this is the blessing of the thought of Divine sympa- 
thy. By the sympathy of man, after all, the wound is not 
healed ; it is only stanched for a time. It can make the tear 
flow less bitterly : it can not dry it up. So far as permanent 
good goes, who has not felt the deep truth which Job taught 
his friends — " Miserable comforters are ye all ?" 

The sympathy of the Divine Human ! He knows what 
strength is needed. He gives grace to help ; and when the 
world, with its thousand forms of temptation, seems to whis- 
per to us as to Esauj Sell me thy birthright, the other voice 
speaks, Shall I barter blessedness for happiness — the inward 
peace for the outward thrill — the benediction of my Father 
for a mess of pottage ? There are moments when we seem 
to tread above this earth, superior to its allurements, able to 
do without its kindness, firmly bracing ourselves to do our 
vvork as He did His. Those moments are not the sunshine 
»if life. They did not come when the world would have said 
hat all round you was glad: but it was when outward 
trials had shaken the soul to its very centre, then there came 
Tom Him " grace to help in time of need." 

1. He who would sympathize must be content to be tried 
and tempted. There is a hard and boisterous rudeness in 
^ur hearts by nature which requires to be softened down. 
W^e pass by suffering gayly, carelessly, not in cruelty, but 
unfeelingly, just because we do not know what sufiering is. 
We wound men by our looks and our abrupt expressions 
without mtending it, because we have not been taught the 
delicacy, and the tact, and the gentleness which can only be 
tearnt by the wounding of our own sensibilities. There is a 
haughty feeling in uprightness which has never been on the 
v^erge of fall that requires humbling. There is an inability 
to enter into difficulties of thought which marks the mind to 
which all things have been presented superficially, and 
which has never experienced the horror of feeling the ice of 
doubt crashing beneath the feet. 

Therefore, if you aspire to be a son of consolation — if yon 
would partake of the priestly gift of sympathy — if you 



98 The Sympathy of Christ 

would pour something beyond commonplace consolatiox 
into a tempted heart — if you would pass through the inter 
course of daily life with the delicate tact which never in 
flicts pain — if to that most acute of human ailments, mental 
doubt, you are ever to give effectual succor, you must be 
content to pay the price of the costly education. Like Him, 
you must suffer — being tempted. 

But remember, it is being tempted in all points, yet with- 
out sin, that makes sympathy real, manly, perfect, instead of 
a mere sentimental tenderness. Sin wdll teach you to fed 
for trials. It will not enable you to judge them, to be mer- 
ciful to them, nor to help them in time of need with any cer- 
tainty. 

Lastly, it is this same human sympathy which qualifies 
Christ for judgment. It is written that the Father hath 
committed all judgment to Him, because He is the Son of 
Man. The sympathy of Christ extends to the frailties of 
human nature, not to its hardened guilt : He is " touched 
with the feeling of our infirmities^ There is nothing in His 
bosom which can harmonize with malice ; He can not feel 
for envy; He has n6 fellow-feeling for cruelty — oppression 
— hypocrisy ; bitter censorious judgments. Remember, He 
could look round about Him with anger. The sympathy of 
Christ is a comforting subject. It is, besides, a tremendous 
subject ; for on sympathy the awards of heaven and hell are 
built. "Except a man be born again" — not he shall not, 
but — " he can not enter into heaven." There is nothing in 
him which has affinity to any thing in the Judge's bosom. 
A sympathy for that which is pure implies a repulsion of 
that which is impure. Hatred of evil is in proportion to the 
strength of love for good. To love good intensely is to hate 
evil intensely. It was in strict accordance with the laws of 
sympathy that He blighted Pharisaism in such ungentle 
words as these : "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers ! how 
can ye escape the damnation of hell?" Win the mind of 
Christ now — or else His sympathy for human nature will 
not save you from, but only insure, the recoil of abhc rrencMJ 
»t the last — " Depart from me ! I never knew you." 



Pharisees and Sadducees at JoJms Baptism. 99 



vin. 

THE PHARISEES AND SADDUCEES AT JOHN'S 
BAPTISM. 

" But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his bap- 
tism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee 
from the wrath to come ?" — Matt. iii. 7. 

It seems that the Baptist's ministry had been attended 
with almost incredible success, as if the population of the 
country had been roused in mass by the tidings of his doc- 
trine. " Then went out to him Jerusalem, and all Judea, 
and all the region round about Jordan, and were baptized 
by him in Jordan, confessing their sins." 

The success of his ministry was tested by the numbers 
that he baptized. Not so a modern ministry. Ministerial 
success is not shown now by the numbers who listen. Not 
mere impression, but altered character, marks success. Not 
by startling nor by electrifying congregations, but by turn- 
ing men from darkness unto light, from the power of Satan 
unto God, is the work done. With John, however, it was 
different. He w^as on earth to do a special work — the work 
of the axe, not the trowel ; to throw down, not to build; to 
startle, not to instruct ; and therefore his baptism was sim- 
ply symbolized by water, the washing away of the past : 
whereas that of Christ was symbolized by fire, the touching 
of the life and heart with the living flame of a heavenlier 
life. Whoever, therefore, came to John for baptism, possess- 
ed conviction of the truth of that which John taught, and 
thereby so far tested the fidelity and success of his ministry. 

Bearing, then, in mind that coming to John's baptism was 
the seal of his success, and that his baptism contained, in 
symbolical form, the whole substance of his teaching, these 
are the two topics of the text : 

I. The meaning wrapped up in John's message. 
H. The Baptist's astonishment at his own success. 

L The meaning of John's message. His baptism implied 
to those who came to put themselves under its protection 
that they were in danger, for it was connected with thts 
warning, " Flee from the wrath to come !" 



lOO Pharisees aitd Sadducees at Johns Baptism, 

Future retribution has become to us a kind of figment. 
Hell is in the world of shadows. The tone in which educa- 
ted men speak of it still, is often only that good-humored 
condescension which makes allowance for childish supersti* 
tion. 

Part of this incredulity arises from the confessedly sym- 
bolical intimations of Scripture on the subject. We read 
of the fire and the worm — of spirits being salted with fire — 
of a lake of fire and brimstone. All this tells solely of phys- 
ical sufiering. And accordingly, for centuries this was the 
predominant conception of Christendom on the subject. 
Scarcely any other element was admitted. Whoever has 
seen those paintings on which the master-spirits in Art have 
thrown down the conceptions of their age, will remember 
that hideous demons, distorted countenances, and waves of 
flame represent the whole idea. And in that immortal work 
in which he who sang of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven has 
embodied the belief of his day, still the same fact prevails. 
You read of the victims of unchaste life hurried on the dark 
whirlwind forever; of the heretics in their coflins of intense 
fire, and of the guilty spirits who are plunged deep down in 
" thick-ribbed ice." But in those harrowing pictures which 
his genius has painted with such vividness, there is not one 
idea of mental sufiering embodied. It is all bodily — awful, in- 
tolerable torture. Now all this we believe no longer. The 
circles of hell and the mountain of purgatory are as fabulous 
to us as the Tartarus of the heathens. Singular that in an 
age in which the chief aim of science appears to be to get rid 
of physical pain and discomfort, as if these were the worst 
evils conceivable, the idea of a bodily hell should be just the 
one at which we have learnt to smile. But with the form, 
we have also dispossessed ourselves of belief in the reality 
of retribution at all. 

Now Scripture language is symbolical. There is no salt, 
no worm, no fire to torture. I say not that a diseased soul 
may not form for itself a tenement hereafter, as here, pecu- 
liarly fitted to be the avenue of sufiering ; but unquestiona- 
bly we can not build upon these expressions a material hell. 

Hell is the infinite terror of the soul, whatever that may 
be. To one man it is pain. Rid him of that, he can bear all 
degradation. To another it is public shame. Save him from 
that, and he will creep and crawl before you to submit to any 
reptile meanness. " Honor me now, I pray thee, before the 
people," cries Saul, till Samuel turns from the abject thincr in 
scorn. To others, the infinite terror is that compared with 
which all these would be a bed of roses. It is the hell of 



Pharisees and Sadducees at Jotms Baptism, i o i 

having done wrong—the hell of having had a spirit from 
God, pure, with high aspirations, and to be conscious of hav- 
ing dulled its delicacy and degraded its desires — the hell of 
having quenched a light brighter than the sun's — of having 
done to another an injury that through time and through 
eternity never can be undone — infinite, maddening remorse 
— the hell of knowing that every chance of excellence, and 
every opportunity of good, has been lost forever. This is the 
infinite terror ; this is wrath to come. 

You doubt that? Have you ever marked that striking 
fact, the connection of the successive stages of the soul? 
How sin can change the countenance, undermine the health, 
produce restlessness ? Think you the grave will end all that 
— that by some magic change the moral being shall be bur 
ied there, and the soul rise again so changed in every feeling 
that the very identity of being would be lost, and it would 
amount to the creation of a new soul? Say you that God is 
love? Oh, but look round this world. The aspect of things 
is stern — very stern. If they be ruled by love, it is a love 
which does not shiink from human agony. There is a law 
of infinite mercy here, but there is a law of boundless rigor 
too. Sin, and you will suffer — that law is not reversed. The 
young, and the gentle, and the tender, are inexorably sub- 
jected to it. We would shield them if we could, but there is 
that which says they shall not be shielded. They shall weep, 
and fade, and taste of mortal anguish, even as others. Carry 
that out into the next world, and you have " wrath to come.'* 

John's baptism, besides, implied the importance of confes- 
sion. "They were baptized, .... confessing their sins." 
On the eve of a promised new life, they were required to ac- 
knowledge the iniquity of their past life. In the cure of our 
spiritual maladies there is a wondrous eflScacy, to use a home- 
ly phrase, in making a " clean breast." There is something 
strengthening, something soothing, and at the same time 
something humbling, in acknowledging that we have done 
wrong. There is a pride in us which can not bear pity. 
There is a diseased sensitiveness which shrinks from the 
smart of acknowledgment ; and yet that smart must be borne 
before we can be truly soothed. When was it that the 
younger son in the parable received the ring, and the robe, 
and the banquet, which represent the rapture of the sense 
of being forgiven ? When he had fortitude enough to go 
back, mile by mile, step by step, every inch of the way he 
had gone wrong, had borne unflinchingly the sneer of his fa- 
ther's domestics, and, worse than all, the sarcasms of his im- 
maculate brother, and manfully said out, " Father^ I have 



I02 Pharisees and Sadducees at yohtis Baptism, 

sinned against heaven and before thee." When was it that 
the publican went down justified to his house — when he said, 
even before a supercilious Pharisee, " God be merciful to me 
a sinner ?" When did the royal delinquent hear the words, 
"The Lord hath also put away thy sin?" When he gave 
the sacrifice of his lips — " I have sinned before the Lord." 
And when did the Church of Ephesus rise into the bright- 
est model of a perfect church that has yet been exhibited on 
earth ? After her converts had publicly come forward, burnt 
those manuscripts which w^ere called " Ephesian letters " to 
the value of 50,000 pieces of silver, " confessed and showed 
their deeds." 

There is a profound truth in the popular anxiety that a 
murderer should confess before he dies. It is an instinctive 
feeling that a true death is better than a false life — that to 
die with unacknow^ledged guilt is a kind of lie. To acknowl- 
edge his sin is to put it from him — to abjure it — to refuse to 
acknowledge it as part of himself— to separate it from him — 
to say, I will keep it as mine no more : then it is gone. Who 
here has a secret of guilt lying like lead upon his heart ? As 
he values serenity of soul, let that secret be made known. 
And if there be one to-day who is impressed or touched by 
all this, let him beware how he procrastinates that which 
was done when John baptized. The iron that once was cool- 
ed may never be warmed again — the heart that once had its 
flood-gates open, and has delayed to pour out the stagnation 
of its wretchedness, may be closed forever. 

Once more, John's baptism implied the necessity of a re- 
newal of heart. We lose part of the significance of that cer- 
emony from its transplantation away from a climate in which 
it was natural and appropriate. 

Ablution in the East is almost a religious duty : the dust 
and heat weigh upon the spirits and heart like a load ; the 
removal is refreshment and happiness. And it was impossi- 
ble to see that significant act — in which the convert went 
down into the water, travel-worn and soiled with dust, disap- 
peared for one moment, and then emerged pure and fresh — ■ 
without feeling that the symbol answered to, and interpreted 
a strong craving of the human heart. It is the desire to wash 
away that which is past and evil. We would fain go to an- 
other country and begin life afresh. We look upon the grave 
almost with complacency, from the fancy that there we shall 
lie down to sleep and wake fresh and new. It was this same 
longing that expressed itself in heathenism by the fabled 
river of forgetfulness, of which the dead must drink before 
they can enter into rest. 



Pharisees and Sadducees at yohns Baptism, 103 

Kow to that craving John gave reality and meaning when 
he said, " Behold the Lamb of God !" For else that craving 
is but a sick fond wish. Had John merely said, " Flee from 
the wrath to come !" he would have filled man's life with the 
terrors of anticipated hell. Had he only said, "My baptism 
implies that ye must be pure," he would have crushed men's 
hearts with the feeling of impossibility ; for excellence without 
Christ is but a dream. He gave meaning and promise to all 
when he said, " Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away 
the sins of the world." 

Sin-laden and guilty men — the end of all the Christian min- 
istry is to say that out with power, " Behold the Lamb of 
God !" Divine life and death ! to have ha-d one glimpse of 
which, with its ennobling impulses, it were w^orth while to 
have endured a life of suffering. When we believe that the 
sacrifice of that Lamb meant love to us, oui hearts are light- 
ened of their load : the past becomes as nothing, and life be- 
gins afresh. Christ is the river of fcrgetfulness in which by- 
gone guilt is overwhelmed. 

n. The Baptist's astonishment at his own success. It was 
a singular scene which was exhibited in those days on the 
banks of Jordan. There was a crowd of human beings, each 
having a history of his own — men who have long mouldered 
in earth's dust, but who were living then in fresh and vigor- 
ous existence. Think of it. Busy life was moving there — 
beings who had their hopes and fears about time and eter- 
nity, to whom life was dear as it is to us at this day. They 
had come to be cured of that worst of human maladies, the 
aching of a hollow heart; and a single mortified man was 
bending over them, whose countenance bore all that peculiar 
aspect of saintliness which comes from spare diet and austere 
habits, and all that unruffled composure which comes from 
lonely communings with God : — a solitary man, who had led 
a hermit's life, but was possessed of rare sagacity in worldly 
matters ; — for, hermit as he was, John took no half-views of 
men and things : there was nothing morbid in his view of 
life; there was sound common sense in the advice he gave 
the different classes which came to him. "Repent," with 
him, did not mean. Come with me into the wilderness to live 
away from the w^orld, but it meant this : Go back to the 
world, and live above it, each doing his work in an unworld- 
ly spirit. It was a strange spectacle, men of the world com- 
ing with implicit reverence to learn the duties of active life 
from a man whose world was the desert, and who knew noth 
ing of active life except by hearsay. 



I04 Pharisees and Sadducees at yohns Baptism, 

Kow what was the secret of this power by which he chained 
the hearts of men as by a spell ? 

One point in the secret of this success was a thing which 
we see every day. Men of thought and quiet contemplation 
exercise a wonderful influence over men of action. We ad- 
mire that which we are not ourselves. The man of business 
owns the control of the man of religious thoughtfulness. 
Like coalesces in this world with unlike. The strong and 
the weak, the contemplative and the active, bind themselves 
toijrether. They are necessary for each other. The active 
soldiers and the scheming publicans came to the lonely, as- 
cetic John to hear something of that still, inner life, of which 
their own career could tell them nothing. 

A second cause of this success appears to have been that 
it was a ministry of terror. Fear has a peculiar fascination. 
As children love the tale of the supernatural which yet makes 
them shudder, so do men, as it would seem, find a delight in 
the pictures of eternal woe which terrify them — partly from 
the pleasure which there is in vivid emotions, and partly, per- 
haps, from a kind of feeling of expiation in the horror which 
is experienced. You could not go among the dullest set of 
rustics and preach graphically and terribly of hell-fire with- 
out insuring a large audience. The preaching of John in 
this respect difiered from the tone of Christ's. Christ taught 
much that God is love. He spoke a great deal of the Fa- 
ther which is in heaven. He instructed in those parables 
which required thoughtful attention, exercise of mind, and a 
gently sensitive conscience. He spoke didactic, calm dis- 
courses, very engaging, but with little excitement in them : 
such discourses as the Sermon on the Mount, respecting 
goodness, purity, duties ; which assuredly, if any one were 
to venture so to speak before a modern congregation, would 
be stigmatized as a moral essay. Accordingly His success 
was much less marked than that of John's. No crowds were 
baptized as His followers : one hundred and twenty, in an 
upper chamber, appear to have been the fruits of his life- 
work. To teach so, is assuredly not the way to make strong 
impressions ; but it is the way to work deeply, gloriously — 
for eternity. How many of John's terrified Pharisees and 
Sadducees, suppose we, retained the impression six months ? 

What is your religion ? Excitability, romance, impression, 
fear ? Remember, excitement has its uses, impression has its 
value. John, in all circumstances of his appearance and style 
of teaching, impressed by excitement. Excitement, warmed 
feelings, make the first actings of religious life and tlie break- 
ing of inveterate habits easier. But excilomeut and impre* 



Fharisees and Sadducees at Johns Baptism, 1 05 

sion are not religion. Neither can you trust to the alarm 
produced by the thought of eternal retribution. Ye that 
have been impressed, beware how you let those impressions 
d'e away. Die they will, and must : we can not live in ex- 
citement forever; but beware of their leaving behind them 
nothing except a languid, jaded heart. If God ever gave you 
the excitements of religion, breaking in upon your monotony, 
as John's teaching broke in upon that of Jerusalem, take care. 
There is no restoring of elasticity to the spring that has been 
overbent. Let impression pass on at once to acting. 

We have another cause to assign for John's success. Men 
felt that he was real. Reality is the secret of all success. 
Religion in Jerusalem had long become a thing of forms. 
Men had settled into a routine of externals, as if all religion 
centred in these. Decencies and proprieties formed the sub- 
stance of human life. And here was a man in God's world 
once more w^ho felt that religion is an everlasting reality. 
Here was a man once more to tell the world that life is 
sliding into the abyss — that all we see is but a shadow — that 
the invisible Life within is the only real life. Here w^as a 
man who could feel the splendors of God shining into his 
soul in the desert without the aid of forms. His locu^^t-food, 
his hair-garment, his indifference to earthly comforts, spoke 
out once more that one at least could make it a conviction 
to live and die upon, that man does not live on bread alone, 
but on the Living Word which proceedeth out of the mouth 
of God. And when that crowd dispersed at sunset, and John 
was left alone in the twilight, with the infinite of darkness 
deepening round him, and the roll of Jordan by his side, re- 
flecting the chaste, clear stars, there was something there 
higher than Pharisaic forms to speak to him ; there w^as 
heaven and eternity to force him to be real. This life was 
swiftly passing. What is it to a man living like John but a 
show and a dream? He was homeless upon earth. Well, 
but beyond — beyond — in the blue eternities above, there was 
the prophet's home. He had cut himself off from the solaces 
of life. He w^as to make an enemy of the man of honor, Her- 
od. He had made an enemy of the man of religion, the Phar- 
isee. But he was passing into that country where it matters 
little whether a man has been clothed in finest linen or in 
coarsest camel's hair : that still country, where the struggle- 
storm of life is over, and such as John nnd their rest at last 
in the home of God, which is reserved for the true and brave. 
If perpetual familiarity with such thoughts as these can not 
make a man real, there is nothing in this world that can. 

And now look at this man. so disciplined. Life to John 



io6 Pharisees and Sadducees atyohns Baptism, 

was a reality. The citizens of Jerusalem could not go to 
him, as they might have gone to the schools of their rabbis, 
for learned subtleties, or to the groves of Athenian literature 
for melting imagery. Speech falls from him sharp — rugged 
— cutting : — a woi'd, and no more. " Repent !" — " wrath to 
come." "The axe is laid at the root of the trees." "Fruit- 
less trees will be cast into the fire." He spoke as men speak 
vhen they are in earnest, simj^ly and abruptly, as if the 
graces of oratory were out of place. And then, that life of 
his ! The world could understand it. There was written on 
it, in letters that needed no magnifying-glass to read, " Not 
of this world." 

It is, after all, this which tells — the reality of unworldli- 
ness. The world is looking on to see what religious people 
mean. It has a most profound contempt for unreality. Such a 
man as John comes before them. Well, we understand that : 
— we do not like him : get him out of the way, and kill him 
if he interferes with us — but it is genuine. They then turn 
and see other men drawing ingenious distinctions between 
one kind of amusement and another — indulging themselves 
on the sabbath-day and condemning others who do similar 
things, and calling that unworldliness. They see that a 
religious man has a shrewd eye to his interests — is quick at 
making a bargain — captivated by show and ostentation- 
affects" titled society. The world is very keen-sighted: it 
looks through the excitement of your religious meetings, 
quietly watches the rest of your scandal, scans your con- 
sciousness, and the question which the world keeps putting 
pertinaciously is. Are these men in earnest? Is it any mar- 
vel if Christian unreality is the subject of scoffs and bitter 
irony ? 

Let men see that you are real — inconsistent, it may be, 
sinful : oh, full of sin, impetuous, hasty, perhaps stern- — John 
was. But compel them to feel that you are in earnest. 
This is the secret of influence. 

So much, then, for the causes of success. Now let us an- 
alyze that success a little more closely, by considering the 
classes of men on whom that influence told. 

First of all, we read of soldiers, publicans, and the poor 
people, coming to John for advice, and with the acknowl- 
edgment of guilt, and we do not read that their arrival 
excited the smallest emotion of astonishment in John's 
bos^m. The wonder was not there. No wonder that the 
poor, whose lot in this world is hard, should look wistfully 
for anciher. No wonder that soldiers, with their prompt 
habits of obedience and their perpetual opportunities of self 



Pharisees and Sadducees at Johns Baptism, 107 

devotion, should recognize with reverence the type of heroic 
life which John presented. No wonder that the guilty pub- 
licans should come for purification of heart. For is it not 
true that the world's outcasts may be led by their very sin 
to Christ ? It is no wonder to see a saddened sinner seeking 
in the disappointment and weariness of solitary age that 
which he rejected in the heat of youth. Why, even the 
world is not astonished when it sees the sinner become the 
saint. Of course, the world has its own sarcastic account to 
give. Dissipation leads to weariness, and weariness to sati- 
ety, and satiety to devotion, and so your great sinner be- 
comes a great saint, and serves God when all his emotions 
are exhausted. Be it so. He who knew our nature well, 
knew that marvellous revolutions go on in the soul of a man 
whom the world counts lost. In our wildest wanderings 
there is sometimes a love, strong as a father's, tender as a 
mother's, watching over us, and bringing back the erring 
child again. Know you not the law of Nature ? Have you 
never seen how out of chaos and ferment Nature brings 
order again — life out of death, beauty out of corruption ? 
Such, gainsay it who will, often is the history of the rise of 
saintliness and purity out of -a disappointed, bruised, and 
penitent spirit. When the life-hopes have become a wreck 
— when the cravings of the heart for keen excitement have 
been ministered to so abundantly as to leave nothing but 
loathing and self-reproach behind — when innocence of heart 
is gone — yes, even then — scoff who w^ill — the voice of Him 
is heard, who so dearly purchased the right to say it : " Come 
unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will 
give you rest." 

John was not surprised that such came to him, owning 
the power of life-giving truth. 

But among those who came, there were two classes who 
did move him to marvel. The first was the moral, self-satis- 
fied formalist. The second was the calm, metaphysical, 
reasoning infidel. When he saw the Pharisees and Saddu- 
cees coming, he said : " Who hath warned you .^" Now who 
were these men ? 

The Pharisees were men who rested satisfied with the 
outward. The form of religion, which varies in all ages, that 
they wanted to stereotype. The inner heart of religion — 
the unchangeable — justice, mercy, truth — that they could not 
feel. They had got their two schools of orthodoxy — the 
school of Shammai and the school of Hillel ; and, under the 
orthodoxy of these popular idols of the day, they were con- 
tent to lose their own power of independent thought ; souls 



io8 Pharisees and Sadducees at John s Baptism. 

that had shrunk away from all goodness and nobleness, and 
withered into the mummy of a soul. They could jangle 
about the breadth of a phylactery ; they could discuss, as if 
it were a matter of life and death, ecclesiastical questions 
about tithe; they could decide to a furlong the length of 
journey allowable on the sabbath-day ; but they could not 
look with mercy upon a broken heart pouring itself out to 
God in His temple, nor suffer a hungry man to rub an ear 
of corn on the Sabbath, nor cover the shame of a tempted 
sister or an erring brother. Men without souls, from whose 
narrow hearts the grandeur of everlasting truth was shut out. 

There was another class in Israel as different from the 
Pharisees as man can be from man. The Sadducees could 
not be satisfied with the creed of Pharisaism, and had begun 
to cross-examine its pretensions. They felt that the thing 
which stood before them there, challenging the exclusive 
name of religion, with its washing of cups, its fastings, its 
parchment texts, this had nothing in it of the Eternal and 
the Infinite. This comes not from the Almighty God, and so 
from doubt they passed on to denial. The usual order had 
taken place. The reaction from superstition is infidelity. 
The reaction from ultra-strictness is laxity. The reaction 
from Pharisaism was the Sadducee. And the Sadducee, with 
a dreadful daring, had had the firmness to say: "Well then, 
there is no life to come. That is settled. I have looked 
into the abyss without trembling. There is no phantom 
there. There is neither angel, spirit, nor life to come. And 
this glorious thing, man, with his deep thoughts, and his 
great, unsatisfied heart, his sorrows and his loves, godlike 
and immortal as he seems, is but dust animated for a time, 
passing into the nothingness out of which he came." That 
cold and hopeless creed was the creed of Sadduceeism. Hu- 
man souls were trying to live on that, and find it enough. 

And the strange thing was that these men, so positive in 
their creed, so distinct in their denial, so intolerant of the 
very name of future existence, crowded to John to make 
those confessions, and promise that new life, which were 
meet for men who desired to flee from the wrath to come. 
Wrath to come ! What had the infidel to do with that ? 
Repentance unto life ! Why should the denier of life listen 
to that ? Fruits meet for repentance ! What had the form- 
alist to do with that rebuke, whose life was already all that 
could be needed ? " O generation of vipers," said the proph- 
et, in astonishment, " who hath warned you to flee from the 
wrath to come ?" 
, I deduce, from those facts which astonished John, two 



Pharisees and Sadducees at yohns Baptism. 1 09 

truths. Formalism, even morality, will not satisfy the con- 
science of man. Infidelity will not give rest to his troubled 
spirit. It is a pregnant lesson, if we will only read it thought- 
fully, to consider those two classes going up for baptism. 
That heart of man which the moralist tells us is so pure and 
excellent, the light of day has shone into it, and behold, in 
the moralist's self, it is not pure, but polluted and miserable : 
else, what has that Pharisee to do with the symbol of new 
life which he has gone to John to use ? That clear, unbiased 
intellect with which the skeptic reached his conclusions, be- 
hold it is not clear nor unbiased ! It has been warped by 
an evil life. His heart is restless, and dark, and desolate ; 
else, why is that Sadducee trembling on Jordan's brink? 
There is a something which they want, both Pharisee and 
Sadducee, and they come to see if baptism will give it them. 
Strangely moved indeed must those men have been — ay, 
shaken to the inmost soul — before they could so c«»ntradict 
their own profession as to acknowledge that there was a 
hollowness in their hearts. We almost fancy we can stand 
at the water's edge and hear the confession which was wrung 
from their lips, hot-burning and choked with sobs, during the 
single hour in which reality had forced itself upon their 
souls: — "It is a lie ! — we are not happy — we are miserable 
— Prophet of the Invisible ! what hast thou got to tell us of 
that awful other world ?" 

For when man comes to front the everlasting God, and 
look the splendor of His judgments in the face, jDersonal in- 
tegrity, the dream of spotlessness and innocence, vanish into 
thin air: your decencies, and your church-goings, and your 
regularities, and your attachment to a correct school and 
party, your gospel formulas of sound doctrine — what is aU 
that, in front of the blaze of the wrath to come ? 

And skepticism too, how philosophical and manly soever 
it may appear, will it rock the conscience with an everlast- 
ing lullaby ? Will it make, with all its reasonings, the tooth 
of the worm less sharp, and the fire less fierce that smoulders 
inwardly ? Let but the plain, true man speak. We ask 
from him no rhetoric. We require no eloquence. Let him 
but say, in his earnestness. Repent — or — Wrath to come, and 
then what has infidelity to fall back upon ? 

There is rest in this world nowhere except in Christ the 
manifested love of God. Trust in excellence, and the better 
you become, the keener is the feeling of deficiency. Wrap 
up all in doubt, and there is a stern voice that will thunder 
at last out of the wilderness upon your dream. 

A heart renewed — a loving heart — a penitent and humble 



no Caiaphas's View of Vicarious Sacrifice, 

heart — a heart broken and contrite, purified by love — that 
and only that is the rest of man. SjDotlessness may do for 
angels, repentance unto life is the highest that belongs to 



rx. 
CAIAPHAS'S VIEW OF VICARIOUS SACRIFICE. 

"And one Of them, named Caiaphas, being the high-priest that same 
fear, said unto them. Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expe- 
dient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole na- 
tion perish not. And this spake he not of himself: but being high-priest 
that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation ; and not for 
that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children 
of God that were scattered abroad. Then from that day forth they took 
counsel together to put him to death." — John xi. 49-53. 

Ox this occasion, the first resolution passed the Jewish 
Sanhedrim to compass the death of Jesus. The immediate 
occasion of their meeting was the fame of the resurrection of 
Lazarus. There were many causes which made the Saviour 
obnoxious to the priests and Pharisees. If that teaching 
wer-e once received, their reign was over : a teaching which 
abolished the pretensions of a priesthood, by making every 
man his own priest, to offer spiritual sacrifices to God — 
which identified religion with Goodness — making spiritual 
excellence, not ritual regularity, the righteousness which 
God accepts — which brought God within the reach of the 
sinner and the fallen — which simplified the whole matter by 
makino^ relio-ion a thino^ of the heart, and not of rabbinical 
learning or theology : — such teaching swept away all the ex- 
clusive pretensions of Pharisaism, made the life which they 
had been building up with so much toil for years time 
wasted, and reduced their whole existence to a lie. 

This was the ground of their hatred to the Son of Man. 
But this was not the ground which they put forward. He 
was tried chiefly on the charge of treason against the Em- 
peror; and the argument by which the mind of the judge 
was principally swayed was, " If thou let this man go, thou 
art not Caesar's friend." The present passage contains the 
Srst trace of the adoption of that ground. " If we let him 
alone, the Romans will come and take away both our place 
ftnd nation." 

Be it observed, then, the real ground of opposition was 
natred of the light. The ostensible ground was patriotism. 



Caiaphass View of Vicarious Sacrifice, 1 1 \ 

public zeal, loyalty, far-sighted policy ; and such is life. The 
motive on which a deed of sin is done is not the motive 
which a man allows to others, or whispers to himself. Listen 
to the criminal receiving sentence, and the cause of condem- 
nation is not the enormity of the crime, but the injustice of 
the country's law. Hear the man of disorderly life, whom 
society has. expelled from her bosom, and the cause of the 
expulsion is not his profligacy, but the false slander which 
has misrepresented him. Take his own account of the 
matter, and he is innocent — injured — pure. For there are 
names so tender, and so full of fond endearment, with which 
this world sugars over its dark guilt towards God, with a 
crust of superficial whiteness, that the sin on which eighteen 
centuries have looked back appalled .was, to the doers of 
that sin, nothing atrocious, but respectable, defensible, nay 
even, under the circumstances, necessary. 

The judgment of one of these righteous murderers was 
given in remarkable terms. Apparently there were some in 
the council, such men as Nicodemus, who could not acquiesce 
in the A'iew given of the matter. Doubtless they alleged the 
unfairness of the proceeding, and the innocence of the ac- 
cused ; upon which Caiaphas replied, " Ye know nothing at 
all, nor consider that it is expedient that one man die for the 
people, and that the whole nation perish not." The remark- 
able point in this judgment is, that it contained the very cen- 
tral doctrine of Christianity : unconsciously, Caiaphas had 
uttered the profoundest of all truths, the necessity of the 
innocent suflering for the guilty. He had stated it in the 
very words which St. John could have himself adopted. But 
they meant one thing in the lips of holy Love, and quite an- 
other thing in the lips of tyrannical Policy. Yet St. John, 
contemplating that sentence years after, could not but feel 
that there was something in the words deeper than met the 
ear — a truth almost inspired, which he did not hesitate to 
call prophetic. " Being high-priest that year, he prophesied.'''' 

We must not, therefore, call this merelj^ a singular coinci- 
dence. It was the same truth viewed from different sides: 
the side of Caiaphas, and the side of John ; the side of the 
world, and the side of God. That truth was the vicarious 
sacrifice of Christ. 

And there are two ways in which you may contemplate 
that sacrifice. Seen from the world's point of view, it is 
unjust, gross, cruel. Seen as John saw it, and as God looks 
at it, it was the sublimest of all truths ; one which so entwines 
itself with our religious consciousness, that you might as soon 
tear from us our very being, as our convictions of the reality 



1 1 2 Caiaphass View of Vicarious Sacrifice. 

of Christ's atonement. Our subject, then, is the vicarious 
sacrifice of Christ. The words of Caiaphas contain a formal 
falsehood and a material truth : the outward statement, and 
an inspired or prophetic inward verity — so that the subject 
branches into two topics : 

I. The human form, in which the words are false. 
II. The divine principle or spirit, in which they are true. 

1. The human form, in which the words are false. 

Vicarious means in the stead of When the Pope calls 
himself the vicar of Christ, he means that he is empowered 
in the stead of Christ to absolve, decree, etc. When we 
speak of vicarious suffering, we mean that suffering which is 
endured in another's stead, and not as the sufferer's own 
desert. 

1. The first falsity in the human statement of that truth of 
vicarious sacrifice is its injustice. Some one said the accused 
is innocent. The reply was. Better that one should die than 
many. " It is expedient for us, that one man should die for 
the people, and that the whole nation perish not." It was 
simply with Caiaphas a question of numbers : the unjust ex- 
pediency of wresting the law a little to do much apparent 
good. The reply to that was plain. Expediency can not 
obliterate right and wrong. Expediency may choose the 
best possible when the conceivable best is not attainable ; 
but in right and wrong there is no better and best. Thou 
shalf not do wrong. Thou 'must not : you may not tell a lie 
to save life. Better that the whole Jewish nation should per- 
ish, than that a Jewish legislature should steep its hand in 
the blood of one innocent. It is not expedient to do injustice. 

There are cases in which it is expedient to choose the sac- 
rifice of one instead of that of many. When a whole army 
or regiment has mutinied, the commander, instead of general 
butchery, may select a few to perish as examples to the rest. 
There is nothing here unjust. The many escape, but the few 
who die deserve to die. But no principle could justify a 
commander in selecting an innocent man, condemning him 
by unjust sentence, and affecting to believe that he w^aa 
guilty, while the transgressors escaped, and learned the 
enormity of their transgressions by seeing execution done 
upon the guiltless. No principle can justify — nothing can 
do more than palliate the conduct of the ship's crew upon 
the raft who slay one of their number to support their exist- 
ence on his flesh. No man would justify the parent, pursued 
in his chariot by wolves over Siberian snows, who throws out 
one of his children to the pack, that the rest may escape 



Caiaphass View of Vicarious Sacrifice, 1 1 3 

while their fangs are buried in their victim. You feel at 
once expediency has no place here. Life is a trifle compared 
with law. Better that all should perish by a visitation ot 
God, than that they should be saved by one murder. 

I do not deny that this aspect has been given to the sacri- 
fice of Christ. It has been represented as if the majesty of 
law demanded a victim : and, so as it glutted its insatiate 
thirst, one victim would do as well as another — the purer 
and the more innocent the better. It has been exhibited as 
if Eternal Love resolved in fury to strike, and so as He had 
His blow, it mattered not whether it fell on the whole world, 
or on the precious head of His own chosen Son. 

Unitarianism has represented the Scriptural view in this 
way, or, rather perhaps, we should say, it has been so repre- 
sented to Unitarians — and, from a view so horrible, no won- 
der if Unitarianism has recoiled. But it is not our fault if 
some blind defenders of the truth have converted the self-de- 
votion of love into a Brahmiuical sacrifice. If the work of 
redemption be defended by parallels drawn from the most 
atrocious records and principles of heathenism, let not the 
fault be laid upon the Bible. We disclaim that as well as 
they. It makes God a Caiaphas. It makes Him adopt the 
words of Caiaphas in the sense of Caiaphas. It represents 
Him in terms which better describe the ungoverned rage of 
Saul, missing his stroke at David, who has offended, and in 
disappointed fury dashing his javelin at his own son Jon- 
athan. 

You must not represent the Atonement as dependent on 
the justice of unrighteous expediency. 

2. This side of viewing the truth Av^as the side of selfish- 
ness. It was not even the calm resolve of men balancing 
whether it be better for one to die or many, but whether it 
is better that He or we should perish. It is conceivable in 
the case supposed above, that a parent in the horrible di- 
lemma should be enough bewildered to resolve to sacrifice 
one rather than lose all ; but it is not conceivable that the 
doubt in his mind should be this — Shall I and the rest per- 
ish or this one ? — yet this was the spirit in which the party 
of Caiaphas spoke. " The Romans will come and take away 
our place and our nation." 

And this spirit, too, is in human nature. The records of 
antiquity are full of it. If a fleet could not sail, it was as- 
sumed that the deities were offended. The purest and ten- 
derest maiden of the royal household was selected to bleed 
upon the altar : and when the sharp knife passed to her in- 
nocent heart, this was the feeling in the bosoms of those 



114 Caiaphas s View of Vicarious Sacrifice, 

stern and unrelenting warriors — of the blood and of the 
stock of Caiaphas — Better she should suffer than we. 

This may be the way in which the sacrifice of Christ is re- 
garded by us. There is a kind of acquiescence in the Atone- 
ment which is purely selfish. The more bloody the repre- 
sentation of the character of God, the greater, of course, the 
satisfaction in feeling sheltered from it. The more wrath in- 
stead of love is believed to be the Divine name, the more 
may a man find joy in believing that he is safe. It is the 
feeling of the Siberian story : the innocent has glutted the 
wolves, and we may pursue our journey in safety. Christ 
has suffered, and I am safe. He bore the agony — I take the 
reward : I may now live with impunity : and, of course, it is 
very easy to call acquiescence in that arrangement humility, 
and to take credit for the abnegation of self-righteousness : 
but whoever can acquiesce in that thought chiefly in refer- 
ence to personal safety^ and, without desiring to share the 
Redeemer's cross, aspire to enjoy the comforts and the bene- 
fits of the Redeemer's sacrifice, has but something of the 
spirit of Caiaphas after all, the spirit which contentedly sac- 
rifices another for self — selfishness assuming the form of wis- 
dom. 

II. We pass to the prophetic or hidden spirit in which 
these words are true. 

I observe, first, that vicarious sacrifice is the Law of Be- 
ing. It is a mysterious and fearful thing to observe how all 
God's universe is built upon this law, how it penetrates and 
pervades all Nature, so that if it were to cease, Nature would 
cease to exist. Hearken to the Saviour himself expounding 
this principle : " Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground 
and die, it abideth alone : but if it die, it bringeth forth much 
fruit." We are justified, therefore, in assuming the Law of 
Nature to be the Law of His own Sacrifice, for He himself 
represents it as the parallel. 

Now observe this world of God's. The mountain-rock 
must have its surface rusted into putrescence and become 
dead soil before the herb can grow. The destruction of the 
mineral is the life of the vegetable. Again tlie same process 
begins. The " corn of wheat dies," and out of death more 
abundant life is born. Out of the soil in which deciduous 
leaves are buried, the young tree shoots vigorously, and 
strikes its roots deep down into the realm of decay and 
death. Upon the life of the vegetable world, the myriad 
forms of higher life sustain themselves — still the same law : 
the sacrifice) of life to give life. Farther still: have we 



- Caiaphass View of Vicarious Sacrifice, 1 1 5 

never pondered over that mystery of nature — the dove 
struck down by the hawk — the deer trembling beneath the 
stroke of the lion — the winged fish falling into the jaws of 
the dolphin ? It is the solemn law of vicarious sacrifice 
again. And as often as man sees his table covered with the 
flesh of animals slain, does he behold, whether he think of it 
or not, the deep mystery and law of being. They have sur- 
rendered their innocent lives that he may live. 

Nay, farther still : it is as impossible for man to live as it 
is for man to be redeemed, except through vicarious suffer- 
ing. The anguish of the mother is the condition of the 
child's life. His very being has its roots in the law of sacri- 
fice ; and from his birth onw^ard, instinctively this becomes 
the law which rules his existence. There is no blessing 
which was ever enjoyed by man which did not come 
through this. There was never a country cleared for civili- 
zation, and purified of its swamps and forests, but the first 
settlers paid the penalty of that which their successors en- 
jo)^ There never, Avas a victory won, but the conquerors 
who took possession of the conquest passed over the bodies 
of the noblest slain, who died that they might win. 

Now observe, all this is the law obeyed, either uncon- 
sciously or else instinctively. But in the redemption of our 
humanity, a moment comes, when that law is recognized as 
the will of God adopted consciously^ and voluntarily obeyed 
as the law of man's existence. Then it is that man's true 
nobleness, his only possible blessedness, and his redemption 
from blind instincts and mere selfishness, begin. You may 
evade that law — you may succeed in living as Caiaphas did, 
sacrificing others instead of yourself — and men will call you 
wise, and prudent, and respectable. But you are only a 
Caiaphas : redeemed you are not. Your proper humanity 
has not begun. 

The highest Man recognized that law, and joyfully em- 
braced it as the law of His existence. It was the conscious- 
ness of His surrender to that as God's will, and the voluntari- 
ness of the act, which made it sacrifice. Hear Him : " No 
man taketh my life from me. I have power to lay it down, 
and I have power to take it up again." " This command- 
ment have I received from my Father." Had he been by 
the wiles of Caiaphas simply surprised and dragged strug- 
gling and reluctant to doom. He would have been a victim, 
but not a sacrifice ; He would have been an object of our 
compassion, but by no means of our admiring wonder. It 
was the foresight of all the result of His opposition to the 
world's sin, and His steady uncompromising battle against 



1 1 6 Caiaphas s View of Vicarious Sacrifice, * 

it notwithstanding, in every one of its forms, knowing that 
He must be its victim at the last, which prevented His death 
from being merely the death of a lamb slain unconsciously on 
Jewish altars, and elevated it to the dignity of a true and 
proper sacrifice. 

We go beyond this, however. It was not merely a sacri- 
fice, it was a sacrifice for sin. " His soul was made an offer- 
ing for sin." Neither was it only a sacrifice for sin — it was 
a sacrifice for the icorlcTs sin. In the text, " that Jesue 
should die for that nation ; and not for that nation only, but 
that also He should gather together in one the children of 
God that were scattered abroad." 

Two ideas are necessary to be distinctly apprehended by 
us in order to understand that : the first is the notion of 
punishment, the second is the idea of the world's sin. 

By punishment is simply meant the penalty annexed to 
transgression of a law\ Punishment is of two kinds : the 
penalty which follows ignorant transgression, and the chas- 
tisement which ensues upon willful disobedience. The first 
of these is called imputed guilt, the second is actual guilt. 
By imputed guilt is meant, in theological language, that a 
person is treated as if he were guilty : if, for example, you ap- 
proach too near the whirling wheel of steam machinery, the 
mutilation which follows is the punishment of temerity. If 
the traveller ignorantly lays his hand on the cockatrice's 
den, the throb of the envenomed fang is the punishment of 
his ignorance. He has broken a law of nature, and the guilt 
of the infection is imputed to him ; there is penalty, but there 
is none of the chastisement which follows sin. His conscience 
is not made miserable. He only suff'ers. 

Farther, according to the constitution of this world, it is 
not only our own transgressions of ignorance, but besides, 
the faults of others, which bring pain and sorrow on us. The 
man of irritable and miserably nervous temperament owes 
that often to a father's intemperance. Many a man has to 
struggle all his life with the penury which he reaps as the 
harvest of a distant ancestor's extravagance. In the strictest 
sense of the Avord, these are punishments — the consequences 
annexed to transgression : and, in the language of theology, 
they are called imputed guilt. But there is an all-important 
distinction between them and the chastisements of personal 
iniquity. If a man suflTer ill health or poverty as the results 
of his own misconduct, his conscience forces him to refer this 
to the wrath of God. He is reaping as he had sown, and 
the miseries of conscious fault are added to his penalty. 
But if such things come as the penalty of the wrong of oth- 



Caiaphass View of Vicarious Sacrifice. 1 1 7 

ers, then, philosophically though you may call them punish- 
ment, in the popular sense of the word they are no punish- 
ments at all, but rather corrective discipline, nay, even rich- 
est blessings, if they are received from a Father's hand, and 
transmuted by humbleness into the means ot spiritual 
growth. 

Apply all this to the sacrifice of Christ. Let no man say 
that Christ bore the wrath of God. Let no man say that 
God was angry with His Son. We are sometimes told of a 
mysterious anguish which Christ endured, the consequence 
of Divine wrath, the sufferings of a heart laden with the 
conscience of the world's transgressions which He was bear- 
ing as if they were His own sins. Do not add to the Bible 
what is not in the Bible. The Redeemer's conscience was 
not bewildered to feel that as His own which was not His 
own. He suffered no wrath of God. Twice came the voice 
from heaven, " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well 
pleased^ There was seen an angel strengthening Him. 
Nay, even to the last, never did the consciousness of purity 
and the Father's love forsake Him. "Father, into Thy 
hands I commend my spirit.'* 

Christ came into collision with the world's evil, and He 
bore the penalty of that daring. He approached the whirl- 
ing wheel, and was torn in pieces. He laid His hand upon 
the cockatrice's den, and its fangs pierced Him. It is the 
law which governs the conflict with evil. It can be only 

crushed by suffering from it The Son of man who 

puts His naked foot on the serpent's head, crushes it : but 
the fang goes into His heel. 

The Redeemer bore imputed sin. He bore the penalty of 
others' sin. He was punished. Did He bear the anger of 
the Most High ? Was His the hell of an accusing con- 
science ? — In the name of Him who is God, not Caiaphas, 
never. Something more, however, is necessary to complete 
our notion of punishment. It is a right estimate of law. 
We are apt to think of punishment as something quite arbi- 
trary, which can be remitted or changed at will. Hence we 
almost always connect it with the idea of wrath ; hence, the 
heathen tried to bribe and coax their deities to spare ; and 
hence the sacrifice of Christ comes to be looked upon in the 
light of a sagacious or ingenious contrivance, a mere 
" scheme " of redemption. 

Now remember what law is. The moral laws of this uni- 
verse are as immutable as God Himself. Law is the Being 
of God. God can not alter those laws : He can not make 
wrong right. He can not make truth falsehood^ nor false- 



1 1 8 Caiaphas s View of Vicarious Sacrifice. 

hood truth. He can not make sin blessed, nor annex hell to 
innocence. Law moves on its majestic course irresistible. 
If His chosen Son violates law, and throws Himself from the 
pinnacle. He dies. If you resist a law of the universe in its 
eternal march, the universe crushes you, that is all. Consid- 
er what law is, and then the idea of bloody vengeance passes 
away altogether from the sacrifice. It is not "an eye for an 
eye," and " a tooth for a tooth," in the sanguinary spirit of 
the old retaliatory legislation. It is the eternal impossibility 
of violating that law of the universe whereby penalty is an- 
nexed to transgression, and must fall, either laden with curse 
or rich in blessing. 

The second idea which it behooves us to master is that of 
the world's sin. The Apostle John always viewed sin as a 
great connected principle — One; a single world-spirit — ex- 
actly as the electricity with which the universe is charged is 
indivisible, imponderable, one, so that you can not sepa- 
rate it from the great ocean of fluid. The electric spark 
that slumbers in the dew-drop is part of the flood which 
struck the oak. Had that spark not been there, it could be 
demonstrated that the whole previous constitution of the 
universe might have been difierent, and the oak not have 
been struck. 

Let us possess ourselves of this view of sin, for it is the 
true one. Separate acts of sin are but manifestations of one 
great principle. It was thus that the Saviour looked on the 
sins of His day. The Jews of that age had had no hand in 
the murder of Abel or Zacharias, but they were of kindred 
spirit with the men who slew them. Condemning their 
murderers, they imitated theil- act. In that imitation they 
" allowed the deeds of their fathers ;" they shared in the 
guilt of the act which had been consummated, because they 
had the spirit which led to it. " The blood of them all shall 
come on this generation." It was so, too, that Stephen look- 
ed on the act of his assassins. When God's glory streamed 
upon his face, he felt that the transaction going on then was 
not simply the violence of a mob in an obscure corner of the 
world, it was an outbreak of the great principle of evil. He 
saw in their act the resurrection of the spirit of those who 
had " resisted the Holy Ghost" in their day, slain the proph- 
ets, opposed Moses, crucified " the just one," and felt that 
their genuine descendants were now opposing themselves to 
the form in which Truth and Goodness were appearing in 
his day. 

It is in this way only that you will be able, with any reali 
ty of feeling, to enter into the truth that " your sins nailed 



Caiaphass View of Vicarious Sacrifice, 1 1 g 

Him to the cross ;" that " the Lord hath laid on Him the in^ 
iquity ot us all ;" that He died " not for that nation only, 
but that also He should gather together in one the children 
of God that were scattered abroad." If, for instance, indis- 
putable evidence be given of the saintliness of a man whose 
creed and views are not yours, and rather than admit that 
good in him is good, you invent all manner of possible mo- 
tives to discredit his excellence, then let the thought arise, 
This is the resurrection of the spirit which was rampant in 
the days of Jesus ; the spirit of those who saw the purest 
goodness, and rather than acknowledge it to be good, prefer- 
red to account for it as a diabolical power. Say to yourself, 
I am verging on the spirit of the sin that was unpardonable, 
I am crucifying the Sou of God afresh. 

If in society you hear the homage unrebuked — Honor to 
the rich man's splendid offering, instead of glory to the wid- 
ow's humble mite — if you see the weak and defenseless pun- 
ished severely for the sins which the great and strong do un- 
blushingly, and even with the connivance and admiration of 
society — if you find sins of frailty placed on the same level 
with sins of pride and presumption — or it you find guilt of 
any kind palliated instead of mourned, then let the dreadful 
thought arise in the fullness of its meaning — I allow the deeds 
of those days — His blood shall come upon this generation. 
My sin and your sin, the sin of all, bears the guilt of the Re- 
deemer's sacrifice. It icas vicarious — He suffered for what 
He never did. " Not for that nation only, but that also He 
should gather together in one the children of God that were 
scattered abroad." 

To conclude : estimate rightly the death of Christ. It was 
not simply the world's example — it was the world's Sacrifice. 
He died not merely as a martyr to the truth. His death is 
the world's life. Ask ye what life is ? Life is not exemption 
from penalty. Salvation is not escape from suffering and 
punishment. The Redeemer suffered punishment, but the Re- 
deemer's soul had blessedness in the very midst of punish- 
ment. Life is elevation of soul — nobleness — Divine charac- 
ter. The spirit of Caiaphas was death : to receive all, and 
give nothing — to sacrifice others to himself. The spirit of 
Christ was life : to give and not receive — to be sacrificed, 
and not to sacrifice. Hear Him again : " He that loseth his 
life, the same shall find it." That is life : the spirit of losing 
all for love's sake. That -is the soul's life which alone is 
blessedness and heaven. By realizing that ideal of humani- 
ty, Christ furnished the life which we appropriate to our- 
selves only when we enter into His spirit. 



120 Realizing the Second Advent. 

Listen: Only by renouncing sin is His death to sin youra 
— only by quitting it are you free from the guilt of His blood 
. — only by voluntary acceptance of the law of the Cross, self- 
surrender to the will of God, and self-devotion to the good 
of others as the law of your being, do you enter into that 
present and future heaven which is the purchase of His vica- 
rious sacrifice. 



REALIZING THE SECOND ADVENT. 

*'For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the lat- 
ter day upon the earth : And though after my skin worms destroy this body, 
yet in my flesh shall I see God : Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes 
?hall behold, and not another j though my reins be consumed within me." — 
Job xix. 25-27. 

The hardest, the severest, the last lesson which man has 
to learn upon this earth, is submission to the will of God. It 
is the hardest lesson, because to our blinded eye-sight it often 
seems a cruel will. It is a severe lesson, because it can be 
only taught by the blighting of much that had been most 
dear. It is the last lesson, because when a man has learned 
that, he is fit to be transplanted from a world of willfulness 
to a world in which one will alone is loved, and only one is 
done. All that saintly experience ever had to teach resolves 
itself into this, the lesson how to say affectionately, "Not as 
I will, but as Thou wilt." Slowly and stubbornly our hearts 
acquiesce in that. The holiest in this congregation, so far as 
he has mastered the lesson, will acknowledge that many a 
sore and angry feeling against his God had to be subdued, 
many a dream of earthly brightness broken, and many a 
burning throb stilled in a proud, resentful heart, before he 
was willing to suffer God to be sovereign in His own worldj 
and do with him and his as seemed to Him best. 

The earliest record that we have of this struggle in the 
human bosom is found in the Book of Job. It is the most 
ancient statement we have of the perplexities and miseries 
of life, so graphic, so true to nature, that it proclaims at once 
that what we are reading is drawn not from romance but 
life. It has been said that religious experience is but the fic- 
titious creation of a polished age, when fanciful feelings are 
called into existence by hearts bent o^ck in reflex and mor- 
bid action on themselves. We have an answer to that in 
this book. Religion is no morbid fancy. In the rough, rude 



Realizing the Second Advent. 1 2 1 

ages when Job lived, when men did not dwell on their feel- 
ings as in later centuries, the heart-work of religion was 
manifestly the same earnest, passionate thing that it is now. 
The heart's misgivings were the same beneath the tent of an 
Arabian Emir which they are beneath the roof of a modern 
Christian. Blow after blow fell on the Oriental chieftain. 
One day he Avas a father — a prince — the lord of many vas- 
sals and many flocks, and buoyant in one of the best of bless- 
ings, health ; the next, he was a childless, blighted, ruined 
man. And then it was that there came from Job's lips those 
yearnings for the quiet of the grave which are so touching, 
so real ; and, considering that some of the strongest of the 
elect of God have yielded to them for a moment, we might 
almost say, so pardonable : " I should have been at rest — 
where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at 
rest. There the prisoners rest together : they hear not the 
voice of the oppressor. Wherefore is light given unto him 
that is in misery, and life unto the bitter of soul — which 
long for death, but it cometh not, and dig for it more than 
for hid treasures — which rejoice exceedingly and are glad 
when they can find the grave ?" 

What is the Book of Job but the record of an earnest soul's 
perplexities ? The double difficulty of life solved there, the 
existence of moral evil — the question whether suffering is a 
mark of wrath or not. What falls from Job's lips is the 
musing of a man half-stunned, half-surprised, looking out 
upon the darkness of life, and asking sorrowfully why are 
these things so ? And all that falls from his friends' lips is 
the common-place remarks of men upon what is inscrutable — 
maxims learned second-hand by rote and not by heart, frag- 
ments of deep truths, but truths misapplied, distorted, torn 
out of all connection of time and place, so as to become ac- 
tual falsehoods : only blistering a raw wound. 

It was from these awkward admonitions that Job appealed 
in the text. He appealed from the tribunal of man's opinion 
to a tribunal where sincerity shall be cleared and vindicated. 
He appealed from a world of confusion, where all the foun- 
dations of the earth are out of course, to a world where all 
shall be set right. He appealed from the dark dealings of a 
God whose way it is to hide Himself, to a God who shall 
stand upon this earth in the clear radiance of a love on 
which suspicion's self can not rest a doubt. It was faith 
straining through the mist, and discerning the firm land that 
is beyond. " I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He 
shall stand at the latter day upon the earth." We take two 
points ; 



122 Realizing the Second Advent. 

I. The certainty of God's interference in the affairs of this 
world. 

IL The means of realizing that interference. 

God's interference, again, is contemplated in this passage 
in a twofold aspect : A present superintendence — " I know 
that my Redeemer liveth." A future, personal, visible inter 
ference — " He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.'? 

I. His present superintendence. 

1. The first truth contained in that is God's personal ex- 
istence. It is not chance, nor fate, which sits at the wheel 
of this world's revolutions. It was no fortuitous concourse of 
atoms which massed themselves into a world of beauty. It 
was no accidental train of circumstances which has brought 
the human race to their present state. It was a living God. 
And it is just so far as this is the conviction of every day, 
and every hour, and every minute — " My Redeemer liveth " — • 
that one man deserves to be called more religious than anoth- 
er. To be religious is to feel that God is the Ever Near. It 
is to go through life with this thought coming instinctively 
and unbidden, "Thou, God, seest me." A life of religion is 
a life of faith : and faith is that strange faculty by which man 
feels the presence of the invisible ; exactly as some animals 
have the power of seeing in the dark. That is the difference 
between the Christian and the world. 

Most men know nothing beyond what they see. This love- 
ly world is all in all to them : its outer beauty, not its hidden 
loveliness. Prosperity — struggle — sadness — it is all the same. 
They struggle through it all alone, and when old age comes, 
and the companions of early days are gone, they feel that they 
are solitary. In all this strange, deep world they never meet, 
or but for a moment, the Spirit of it all, who stands at their 
very side. And it is exactly the opposite of this that makes 
a Christian. Move where he will, there is a Thought and a 
Presence which he can not put aside. He is haunted forever 
by the Eternal Mind. God looks out upon him from the clear 
sky, and through the thick darkness — is present in the rain- 
drop that trickles down the branches, and in the tempest that 
crashes down the forest. A living Redeemer stands beside 
him — goes with him — talks with him, as a man with his friend. 
The emphatic description of a life of spirituality is : " Enoch 
walked with God :" and it seems to be one reason why a 
manifestation of God was given us in the flesh, that this liv- 
ingness of God might be more distinctly felt by us. 

We must not throw into these words of Job a meaning 
which Job had not. Readinsj these verses, some have dia- 



Realizing the Second Advent, 123 

covered in them all the Christian doctrine of the Second Ad' 
^ ert — of a Resurrection — of the Humanity of Christ. This 
is simply an anachronism. Job was an Arabian Emir, not a 
Christian. All that Job meant by these words was, that he 
knew he had a vindicator in God above: that though hih 
friends had the best of it then, and though worms were prey- 
ing on his flesh, yet at last God Himself would interfere to 
prove his innocence. But God has given to us, for our faith 
to rest on, something more distinct and tangible than He 
gave to Job. There has been One on earth through w hose 
lips God's voice spoke, and from whose character was reflect- 
ed the character of God. A living Person manifesting Deity. 
It is all this added meaning gained from Christ wdth which 
we use these words: "I know that my Redeemer liveth." 
But we must remember that all that was not revealed to Job. 

2. The second truth implied in the personal existence of a 
Redeemer is sympathy. It was the keenest part of Job's 
trial that no heart beat pulse to pulse with his. His friends 
misunderstood him ; and his wife, in a moment of atheistic 
bitterness, in the spirit of our own infidel poet, " Let no man 
say that God in mercy gave that stroke," addressed him thus : 
"Curse God and die." In the midst of this, it seems to have 
risen upon his heart with a strange power to soothe, that he 
was not alone : gall and bitterness were distilling from the 
lips of man, and molten lead was dropping from the hand of 
God. But there w^as a great difierence between the two in- 
flictions. Men were doing their work, unknow^ing of the pain 
they gave : God was meting out His in the scales of a most 
exquisite compassion, not one drop too much, and every drop 
that fell had a meaning of love in it. " Afiiiction," said the 
tried man, " cometh not out of the dust, neither doth trouble 
spring out of the ground " — superintending all this, " I know 
that my Redeemer liveth." 

And here there is one word full of meaning, from which we 
collect the truth of sympathy. It is that little word of ap- 
propriation, "my" Redeemer. Power is shown by God's at- 
tention to the vast ; sympathy by His condescension to the 
small. It is not the thought of heaven's sympathy by which 
we are impressed, when we gaze through the telescope on the 
mighty world of space, and gain an idea of what is meant by 
infinite. Majesty and power are there, but the lery vastness 
excludes the thought of sympathy. It is when we look into 
the world of insignificance which the microscope reveals, and 
find that God has gorgeously painted the atoms of creation, 
and exquisitely furnished forth all that belongs to minutest 
life, that we feel that God sympathizes and individualizes. 



124 Realizing the Seco7id Advent 

"V\Tien we are told that God is the Redeemer of the wwld^ 
we know that love dwells in the bosom of the Most High; 
but if we want to know that God feels for us individually 
and separately, we must learn by heart this syllable of en- 
dearment, "J[/y Redeemer." Child of God, if you would 
have your thought of God something beyond a cold feeling 
of His presence, let faith appropriate Christ. You are as much 
the object of God's solicitude as if none lived but yourself 
He has counted the hairs of your head. In Old Testament 
language, "He has put your tears into His bottle." He has 
numbered your sighs and your smiles. He has interpreted 
the desires for which you have not found a name nor an ut- 
terance yourself If you have not learned to say, "J/y Re- 
deemer," then just so far as there is any thing tender or affec- 
tionate in your disj^osition, you will tread the path of your 
pilgrimage with a darkened and a lonely heart ; and when 
the day of trouble comes, there w^ill be none of that triumph- 
ant elasticity which enabled Job to look down, as from a 
rock, upon the surges which were curling their crests of fury 
at his feet, but could only reach his bosom with their spent 
spray. 

3. The third thing implied in the present superintendence 
is God's vindication of wrongs. The word translated here 
Redeemer is one of quite peculiar signification. In all the 
early stages of society the redress of wrongs is not a public, 
but a private act. It was then as now — blood for blood. 
But the executioner of the law was invested with something 
of a sacred character. Xow he is the mere creature of a 
country's law, then he was the delegated hand of God ; for 
the next of kin to the murdered man stood forward solemnly 
in God's name as the champion of the defenseless, the goel^ or 
Avenger of Blood. Goel is the word here : so that, trans- 
lated into the language of those far-back days. Job was pro- 
fessing his conviction that there was a champion or an 
Avenger, who would one day do battle for his wrongs. 

It is a fearful amount of this kind of work which is in ar- 
rear for the Avenger to execute, accumulating century by 
century, and year by year. From the days of Cain and Abel 
there have been ever two classes : the oppressor and the op- 
pressed; the gentle humble ones who refuse to right them- 
selves, and the unscrupulous who force them aside. The 
Church has ever had the world against it. The world struck 
its first deadly blow by the hand of Cain, and it has been 
striking ever since: from the battle-field, and the martyr's 
stake, and the dungeons of the Inquisition, and the prisons 
of the lordly tyrant, the blood of the innocent has cried fol 



Realizing the Second Advent. 125 

vengeance. By taunt and sneer, the world has had her tri« 
umph. And the servants of the Meekest have only had thii 
to cheer them, " I know that my Redeemer liveth." 

There is a persecution sharper than that of the axe. There 
is an iron that goes into the heart deeper than the knife. 
Cruel sneers, and sarcasms, and pitiless judgments, and cold- 
hearted calumnies — these are persecution. There is the ty- 
rant of the nursery, and the play-ground, and the domestic 
circle, as w^ell as of the judgment-hall. "Better were it," 
said the Redeemer, " for that man il a millstone had been 
hanged about his neck." Did you ever do that ? Did you 
ever pour bitterness into a heart that God was bruising, by a 
cold laugh, or a sneer, or a galling suspicion — into a sister's 
heart, or a friend's, or even a stranger's ? — Remember — when 
you sent them, as Job's friends sent him, to pour out their 
griefs alone before their Father, your name went up to the 
Avenger's ears, mingled with the cries of His own elect. 

There is a second mode in which God interferes in this 
world's affairs. There is a present superintendence perceived 
by faith? but there is a future redress which will be made 
manifest to sight. "He shall stand at the latter day upon 
the earth." I shall see Him. 

First of all, there will be a visible, personal interference. 
All that Job meant was in the case of his own wrongs. But 
\iwe use those words, we must apply them in a higher sense. 
The Second Advent of Christ is supposed by some to mean 
an appearance of Jesus in the flesh to reign and triumph vis- 
ibly. Others who feel that the visual perception of His form 
would be a small blessing, and that the highest and truest 
presence is always spiritual and realized by the Spirit, believe 
that His advent will be a coming in power. We will not 
dispute : controversy whets the intellect, and only starves, or 
worse, poisons the heart. We will take what is certain. 
Every signal manifestation of the right, and vindication of 
the truth in judgment, is called in Scripture a coming of the 
Son of Man. A personal advent of the Redeemer is one 
which can be perceived by foes as well as recognized by 
friends. The destruction of Jerusalem, recognized by the 
heathen themselves as judgment, is called in the Bible a com- 
ing of Christ. In the Deluge, in the destruction of the cities 
of the plain, in the confusion of tongues, God is said to have 
come down to visit the earth. There are two classes, then, 
who shall see that sight. Men like Job, who feel that their 
Redeemer liveth ; and men like Balaam, from whose lips 
words of truth, terrible to him, came : " I shall see Him, but 
not now; I shall behold Him, but not nigh." "Every eye 



126 Realizing the Second Advent 

shall see Him." You will see the triumph of the right — the 
destruction of the wrong. The awful question is, As Balaam 
• — or as Job ? 

Besides this, it will be unexpected : every judgment com* 
ing of Christ is as the springing of a mine. There is a mo- 
ment of deep suspense after the match has been applied to 
the fuse which is to fire the train. Men stand at a distance, 
and hold their breath. There is nothing seen but a thin, 
small column of white smoke, rising fainter and fainter, till it 
seems to die away. Then men breathe again ; and the inex- 
perienced soldier would approach the place thinking that the 
thing has been a failure. It is only faith in the experience of 
the commander, or the veterans, which keeps men from hur- 
rying to the spot again — till just when expectation has be- 
gun to die away, the low, deep thunder sends up the column 
of earth majestically to heaven, and all that .was on it comes 
crushing down again in its far circle, shattered and blacken- 
ed with the blast. 

It is so with the world. By God's word the world is doom 
ed. The moment of suspense is past : the first centuries, in 
which men expected the convulsion to take place at once ; 
for even apostles were looking for it in their lifetime. We 
have fallen upon days of skepticism. There are no signs of 
ruin yet. We tread upon it like a solid thing fortified by its 
adamantine hills forever. There is nothing against that but 
a few words in a printed book. But the world is mined : and 
the spark has fallen ; and just at the moment when serenity 
is at its height, " the heaven shall pass away with a great 
noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat," and the 
feet of the Avenger shall stand on the earth. 



II. The means of realizing this interference. 

There is a difference between knowing a thing and realiz- 
ing it. When a poor man becomes suddenly the possessor of 
a fortune or of dignity, it is some time before the thing be- 
comes so natural to him that he can act in his new sphere 
like his proper self: it is all strangeness at first. When the 
criminal hears the death-sentence in the dock, his cheeks are 
tearless. He hears the words, but scarcely understands that 
they have any thing to do with him. He has not realized 
that it is he himself that has to die. When bereavement 
comes, it is not at the moment when the breath leaves the 
body that we feel what has been lost : we know, but yet we 
must have it in detail : see the empty chair, and the clothes 
that will never be worn again, and perceive day after day 
pass, and be comes not : then we realize. 



Realizing the SeconcC Advent. 127 

tfo6 linefw that God was the vindicator of wrongs — that he 
(said. But why did he go on repeating in every possible form 
the same thing : " I shall see God — see him for myself — mine 
eyes shall behold Him — yes, mine and not another's ?" It 
would seem as if he w^ere doing what a man does when he 
repeats over and over to himself a thing which he can not 
picture out in its reality. It w^as true : but it was strange, 
and shadowy, and unfamiliar. 

It is no matter of uncertainty to any one of us whether he 
himself shall die. He knows it. Every time the funeral bell 
tolls, the thought in some shape suggests itself, I am a mor- 
tal, dying man. That is knowing it. Which of us has real- 
ized it ? Who can shut his eyes, and bring it before him as a 
reality, that the day will come when the hearse will stand at 
the door for him, and that all this bright world will be going 
on without him; and that the very flesh which now walks 
about so complacently, will have the coiEn-lid shut down 
upon it, and be left to darkness, and loneliness, and silence, 
and the w^orm ? Or take a case still more closely suggested 
by the text — out of the grave we must arise again — long after 
all that is young, and strong, and beautiful before me shall 
have mouldered into forgetfulness. Earth shall hear her 
Master's voice breakins: the long silence of the centuries, and 
our dust shall hear it, and stand up among the myriads that 
are moving on to judgment. Each man in his own proper 
identity, his very self, must see God, and be seen by Him — 
looking out on the strange new^ scene, and doomed to be an 
actor in it for all eternity. We all hnow that — on which of 
our hearts is it stamped, not as a doctrine to be proved by 
texts, but as one of those things which must be hereafter, and 
in sight of which we are to live now ? 

There are two ways suggested to us by this passage for 
realizing these things. The first of these is meditation. Xo 
man forgets what the mind has dwelt long on. It is not by 
a passing glance that things become riveted in the memory. 
It is by forcing the memory to call them up again and again 
in leisure hours. It is in the power of meditation to bring 
danger in its reality so vividly before the imagination that 
the whole frame can start instinctively as if the blow were 
falling, or as if the precipice were near. It is in the power 
of meditation so to engrave scenes of loA-eliness on a painter's 
eye that he transfers to the canvas a vivid picture that was 
real to him before it was real to others. It is in the power 
of meditation so to abstract the soul from all that is passing 
before the bodily eye, that the tongue shall absently speak 
out the words with which the heart was full, not knowing 



128 Realizing the Second Advent. 

that others are standing by. It seems to have been this that 
Job was doing — he was realizing by meditation. You can 
scarcely read over these words without fancying them the 
syllables of a man who was thinking aloud. 

It is like a soliloquy rather than a conversation. " I shall 
see him." Myself. Not another. My own eyes. 

This is what we want. It is good for a man to get alone, 
and then in silence think upon his own death, and feel how 
time is hurrying him along : that a little while ago, and he 
was not — a little while still, and he will be no more. It is 
good to take the Bible in his hands, and read those passages 
at this season of the year which speak of the Coming and the 
End of all, till from the printed syllables there seems to come 
out something that has life, and form, and substance in it, 
and all things that are passing in the world group themselves 
in preparation for that, and melt into its outline. Let us try 
to live with these things in view. God our Friend — Christ 
our living Redeemer ; our sympathizing Brother ; our con- 
quering Champion : the triumph of truth, the end of wrong. 
We shall live upon realities then : and this world will fade 
away into that which we know it is, but yet can not realize 
— an appearance, and a shadow. 

Lastly, God insures that His children shall realize all this 
by affliction. Job had admitted these things before, but this 
time he spoke from the ashes on which he was writhing. 
And if ever a man is sincere, it is when he is in pain. If 
ever that superficial covering of conventionalities falls from 
the soul, which gathers round it as the cuticle does upon the 
body, and the rust upon the metal, it is when men are suffer- 
ing. There are many things which nothing but sorrow can 
teach us. Sorrow is the great teaelier. Sorrow is the real- 
izer. It is a strange and touching thing to hear the young 
speak truths which are not yet within the limits of their ex- 
perience : to listen while they say that life is sorrowful, that 
friends are treacherous, that there is quiet in the grave. 
When we are boys we adopt the phrases that we hear. In a 
kind of prodigal excess of happiness, we say that the world is 
a dream, and life a nothing — that eternity lasts forever, and 
that all here is disappointment. But there comes a day of 
sharpness, when we find to our surprise that what we said 
had a meaning in it, and we are startled. That is the senti- 
mentalism of youth passing into reality. In the lips of the 
young such phrases are only sentimentalities. What we 
mean by sentimentalism is that state in which a man speaks 
things deep and true, not because he feels them strongly, but 
because he perceives that they are beautiful, and that it is 



Realizing the Second A cCvent, 129 

touching and fine to say them — things which he fain would 
feel, and fancies that he does feel. Therefore, when all is 
well, when friends abound, and health is strong, and the com- 
forts of life are around us, religion becomes faint and shad- 
owy. Religious phraseology passes into cant — the gay, and 
light, and trifling use the same words as the holiest ; till the 
earnest man, who feels what the world is sentimentalizing 
about, shuts up his heart, and either coins other phrases or 
else keeps silence. 

And then it is that if God would rescue a man from that 
unreal world of names and mere knowledge. He does what he 
did with Job — He strips him of his flocks, and his herds, and 
his wealth ; or else, what is the equivalent, of the power of 
enjoying them — the desire of his eyes falls from him at a 
stroke. Things become real then. Trial brings man face to 
face with God — God and he touch ; and the flimsy veil of 
bright cloud that hung between him and the sky is blown 
away : he feels that he is standing outside the earth with 
nothing between him and the Eternal Infinite. Oh, there is 
something in the sick-bed, and the aching heart, and the rest- 
lessness and the languor of shattered health, and the sorrow 
of affections withered, and the stream of life poisoned at its 
fountain, and the cold, lonely feeling of utter rawness of heart 
which is felt when God strikes home in earnest, that forces a 
man to feel what is real and what is not. 

This is the blessing of affliction to those who will lie still 
and not struggle in a cowardly or a resentful way. It is 
God speaking to Job out of the whirlwind, and saying. In 
the sunshine and the warmth you can not meet Me : but in 
the hurricane and the darkness, when wave after wave has 
swept down and across the soul, you shall see My form, and 
hear My voice, and know that your Redeemer liveth. 

E 



1 30 First Advent Lecture, 



XI. 
FIRST ADVENT LECTURE. 

THE GRECIAIS'. 

" I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians ; both to the wise 
%nd to the unwise. So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gos 
pel to you that are at Rome also. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of 
Christ : for it is the power of God unto salvation to eveiy one that believeth ; 
to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of 
God revealed from faith to faith : as it is written, The just shall live by 
faith."— Rom. i. 14-17. 

The season of Advent commemorates three facts. 1. 
That the Lord has come. 2. That He is perpetually coming. 
3. That He will yet come in greater glory than has yet ap- 
peared. And these are the three Advents : The first in the 
flesh, which is past ; the second in the spirit ; the third, His 
judgment advent. 

The first occupies our attention in these lectures. 

We live surrounded by Christian institutions ; breathe an 
atmosphere saturated by Christianity. It is exceedingly 
difficult even to imagine another state of things. In the en- 
joyment of domestic purity, it is difficult to conceive the de- 
basing effects of polygamy; in the midst of political liber- 
ty, to conceive of the blighting power of slavery ; in scien- 
tific progress, to imagine mental stagnation ; in religious lib- 
erty and free goodness, to fancy the reign of superstition. 

Yet to realize the blessings of health we must sit by the 
sick-bed ; to feel what light is we must descend into the 
mine and see the emaciated forms which dwindle away in 
darkness ; to know what the blessing of sunshine is, go down 
into the valleys where stunted vegetation and dim vapors 
tell of a scene on which the sun scarcely shines two hours in 
the day. And to know what we have from Christianity, it 
is well to cast the eyes sometimes over the darkness from 
which the Advent of Christ redeemed us. 

There are four departments of human nature spoken of in 
these verses on which the light shined. The apostle felt that 
the Gospel was the power of God unto salvation to the 
Greeks, the Romans, the Barbarians, and the Jews. In the 
present lecture we consider Christianity presented to the 
Grecian character, and superseding the Grecian religion. 



The Grecian, 131 

Four characteristics marked Grecian life and Grecian 
religion : Restlessness, worldliness, the worship of the beau- 
tiful, the worship of the human. 

L Restlessness. Polytheism divided the contemplation 
over many objects : and as the outward objects were mani- 
fold, so was there a want of unity in the inward life. The 
Grecian mind was distracted by variety. He was to obtain 
wisdom from one Deity : eloquence from that Mercurius for 
whom Paul was taken ; purity from Diana for whom Ephe- 
sus was zealous ; protection for his family or country from 
the respective tutelary deities ; success by a prayer to For- 
tune. 

Hence dissipation of mind — that fickleness for which the 
Greeks were famous — and the restless love of novelty w^hich 
made Athens a place of literary and social gossip — " some 
new thing." All stability of character rests on the contem- 
plation of changeless unity. 

So in modern science, which is eminently Christian, having 
exchanged the bold theorizing of ancient times for the pa- 
tient humble willingness to be taught by the facts of nature, 
and performing its wonders by exact imitation of them — on 
the Christian principle — the Son of man can do nothing of 
Himself but what He seeth the Father do. 

And all the results of science have been to simplify and 
trace back the manifold to unity. Ancient science was only 
a number of insulated facts and discordant laws; modern 
science has gradually ranged these under fewer and ever 
fewer laws. It is ever tending towards unity of law. 

For example, gravitation. The planet's motion, and the 
motion of the atom of water that dashes tumultuously, and 
as it seems lawlessly, down the foam of the cataract ; the 
floating of the cork, the sinking of the stone, the rise of the 
balloon, and the curved flight of the arrow, are all brought 
under one single law, diverse and opposite as they seem. 

Hence science is calm and dignified, reposing upon uniform 
fact. The philosopher's very look tells of repose, restiufj, as 
he does, on a few changeless principles. 

So also in religion. Christianity proclaimed " One God 
and one Mediator between God and Man, the man Christ 
Jesus." Observe the efiect in the case of two apostles. St. 
Paul's view of the Gospel contemplated it as an eternal 
divine purpose. His Gospel, the salvation of the Gentiles, 
was the eternal purpose which had been hidden from ages 
and generations. His own personal election was part of an 
eternal counsel. All the children of God had been predesti- 



132 First Advent Lecture, 

nated before the creation " unto the adoption of children by 
Jesus Christ to Himself" Kow see the effect on character. 
First, on A^eracity — 2 Cor. i. 18, etc. He contemplated the 
changeless " yea " of God ; His own yea became fixed as 
God's — changeless, and calmly unalterable. 

Again in orthodoxy — "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, 
to-day, and forever." "Be not carried about by divers and 
strange doctrines." Truth is one, error manifold — many 
opinions, yet there can be but one faith. See how calm and 
full of rest all this spirit is. 

Xow consider St. John. His view of the Gospel recog- 
nized it rather as the manifestation of love than the carry- 
ing out of the unity of an everlasting purpose. If you view 
the world as the Greek did, all is so various that you must 
either refer it to various deities, or to different modes of the 
same Deity. To-day you are happy — God is pleased : to- 
morrow miserable — God is angry. But St. John referred 
these all to unity of character — "God is Love." Pain and 
pleasure, the sigh and smile, the sunshine and the storm, nay, 
hell itself, to him were but the results of eternal love. 

Hence came deep calm — the repose which we are toiling 
all our lives to find, and which the Greek never found. 

n. Worldliness. There are men and nations to whom 
this world seems given as their province, as if they had no 
aspiration above it. If ever there was a nation who under- 
stood the science of living, it was the Grecian. They had 
organized social and domestic life ; filled existence with 
comforts ; knew how to extract from every thing its great- 
est measure of enjoyment. This world was their home; this 
visible world was the object of their worship. Not like the 
Orientals, who called all materialism bad, and whose highest 
object was to escape from it, " to be unclothed, not clothed 
upon," as St. Paul phrases it. The Greeks looked upon this 
world in its fallen state, and pronounced it all " very good." 

The results were threefold. 

1. Disappointment. Lying on the infinite bosom of Na- 
ture, the Greek was yet unsatisfied. And there is an insa- 
tiable desire above all external forms and objects in man- 
all men — which they can never satisfy. Hence his craving 
too, like others, was from time to time, " Who will show us 
any good ?" This dissatisfaction is exhibited in the parable 
of the prodigal, who is but the symbol of erring humanity. 
Away from his father's home, the famine came, and he fed 
on husks. Famine and husks are the world's unsatisfactori- 
uess. A husk is a thin^j that seems full — is reall^^ hollow—* 



The Grecian. 133 

which stays the appetite for a time, but will not support the 
life. And such is this world — leaving a hollowness at heart, 
staying our craving but for a time. " He that drinketh of 
this water shall thirst again." And the worldly man is try- 
ing to satiate his immortal hunger upon husks. 

3. Degradation. Religion aims at an ideal life above this 
actual one — to found a divine polity — a kingdom of God — a 
church of the best. And the life of worldliness pronounces 
this world to be all. This is to be adorned and beautified. 
Life as it is. Had you asked the Greek his highest wish, he 
would have replied, "This world, if it could only last — I ask 
no more." Immortal youth — and this bright existence. 
This is to feed on husks, but husks which the swine did eat. 
No degradation to the swine, for it is their nature ; but 
degradation to man to rest in the outward, visible, and pres- 
ent, for the bosom of God is his home. The Greek, therefore, 
might be, in his own language, " a reasoning animal," but 
not one of the children of heaven. 

3. Disbelief in immortality. The more the Greek attached 
himself to this world, the more the world unseen became a 
dim world of shades. The earlier traditions of the deep- 
thinking Orientals, which his forefathers brought from Asia, 
died slowly away, and any one who reminded him of them 
was received as one would now be who were to speak of pur- 
gatory. The cultivated Athenians were for the most part skep- 
tics in the time of Christ. Accordingly, when Paul preach- 
ed at Athens the resurrection of the dead, they "mocked." 

This bright world was all. Its revels, its dances, its the- 
atrical exhibitions, its races, its baths, and academic groves, 
where literary leisure luxuriated, these were blessedness, 
and the Greek's hell was death. Their poets speak pathet- 
ically of the misery of the wrench from all that is dear and 
bright. The dreadfulness of death is one of the most re- 
markable thino;s that meet us in those ancient writinsfs. 

And these men were startled by seeing a new sect rise uy 
to whom death was nothing — who almost courted it. They 
heard an apostle say at Miletus, " None of these things move 
me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might 
finish my course with joy." For the cross of Christ had 
crucified in their hearts the Grecian's world. To them life 
was honor, integrity, truth ; that is the soul : to this all 
5ther was to be sacrificed. This was the proper self, which 
could only die by sin, by denying its own existence. The 
rise of the higher life had made this life nothing, " and de- 
livered those who, through fear of death, were all their life* 
time subject unto bondage." 



1 34 First Advent Lecture. 

Appeal to the worldly-minded. Melancholy spectacle! 
Men and women shutting out the idea of death, the courte* 
eies of society concealing from them the mention of their 
age, by all false appliances of dress, etc., etc., and staying the 
appearance of the hand of time. You must die. The day 
will come, and the coffin. Life in God alone robs that 
thought of dreadfulness : when the resurrection being begun 
within, you can look upon the decay of the outward man, 
and feel, I am not dying. 

m. The worship of the beautiful. The Greek saw this 
world almost only on its side of beauty. His name for it was 
Cosmos, divine order or regularity. He looked at actions in 
the same way. One and the same adjective expressed the 
noble and the beautiful. If he wanted to express a perfect 
man, he called him a musical or harmonious man. 

What was the consequence ? Religion degenerated into 
the arts. All the immortal powers of man were thrown upon 
the production of a work of the imagination. The artist who 
had achieved a beautiful statue was almost worshipped ; the 
poet who had produced a noble poem was the prophet of the 
nation ; the man who gave the richest strains of melody was 
half divine. This w^as their inspiration. The arts became 
reliofion, and reliojion ended in the arts. 

Hence, necessarily, sensuality became religious, because all 
feelings produced by these arts, chiefly the voluptuous ones, 
were authorized by religion. There is a peculiar danger in 
refinement of sensuous enjoyments. Coarse pleasures dis- 
gust, and pass for what they are ; but who does not know 
that the real danger and triumph of voluptuousness are 
when it .approaches the soul veiled under the drapery of ele- 
gance ? They fancied themselves above the gross multi- 
tude : but their sensuality, disguised even from themselves, 
was sensuality still — ay, and at times even, in certain festi- 
vals, broke out into gross and unmistakable licentiousness. 

And hence the greatest of the Greeks, in his imaginary re- 
public, banished from that perfect state all the strains which 
were soft and enfeebling — all the poems that represented any 
deeds of deities unworthy of the Divine — all the statues 
which could suggest one single feeling of impurity. Him- 
self a worshipper of the purest beautiful, it was yet given to 
his all but inspired heart to detect the lurking danger before 
which Greece was destined to fall — the approach of sensuali- 
ty through the worship of the graceful and the refined. 

There is this danger now. Men are awakened from coarse 
rude life to the desire of something deeper ; and the god or 



The Grecian, 135 

spirit of this world can subtly turn that aside into channelg 
which shall effectually enfeeble and ruin the soul. Refine- 
ment — melting imagery — dim religious light ; all the witch- 
ery of foi-m and color — music — architecture ; all these, even 
colored wirh the hues of religion, producing feelings either 
religious or quasi-religious, may yet do the world's work. 
For all attempt to impress the heart through the senses, "to 
make perfect through the flesh," is fraught with that danger 
beneath which Greece sunk. There is a self-deception in 
those feelings — the thnll, and the sense of mystery, and the 
luxury of contemplation, and the impressions on the senses : 
all these lie very close to voluptuousness — enfeeblement of 
heart — yea, even impurity. 

This, too, is the ruinous effect of an education of accom- 
plishments. The education of the taste, and the cultivation 
of the feelings in undue proportion, destroy the masculine 
tone of mind. An education chiefly romantic or poetical, not 
balanced by hard practical life, is simply the ruin of the 
soul. 

If any one ever felt the beauty of this world, it was He. 
The beauty of the lily nestling in the grass — He felt it all ; 
but the beauty which He exhibited in life was the stern love- 
liness of moral acj:ion. The King in His Beauty " had no 
form or comeliness ;" it was the beauty of obedience, of noble 
deeds, of unconquerable fidelity, of unswerving truth, of Di- 
vine self-devotion. The Cross ! the Cross ! We must have 
something of iron and hardness in our characters. The Cross 
tells us that is the true Beautiful which is Divine : an in- 
ward, not an outward beauty, which rejects and turns stern- 
ly away from the meretricious forms of the outward world, 
which have a corrupting or debilitating tendency. 

rV. The worship of humanity. The Greek had strong hu- 
man feelings and sympathies. He projected his own self on 
nature ; humanized it ; gave a human feeling to clouds, for- 
ests, rivers, seas. 

In this he was a step above other idolatries. The Hindoo, 
for instance, worshipped monstrous emblems of physical pow- 
er. Might — gigantic masses — hundred-handed deities, scarce- 
ly human, you find in Hindostan. In Egypt, again, life was the 
thing sacred. Hence all that had life was in a way divine — 
the sacred ibis, crocodile, bull, cat, snake. All that produced 
and all that ended life. Hence death too was sacred. The 
Egyptian lived in the contemplation of death. His cofiin 
was made in his lifetime ; his ancestors embalmed ; the sa- 
cred animals preserved in myriad heaps through generations 



1 36 First Advent Lecture, 

in mummy pits. The sovereign's tomb was built to last for^ 
not centuries, but thousands of years. 

The Greek was above this. It was not merely power, but 
human power ; not merely beauty, but human beauty ; not 
merely life, but human life, which was the object of his pro- 
foundest veneration. His effort therefore was, in his concep- 
tion of his god, to realize a beautiful human being. And not 
the animal beauty of the human only, but the intelligence 
which informs and shines through beauty. All his life he 
was moulding into shape visions of earth — a glorious human 
being. Light under the conditions of humanity ; the " sun 
in human limbs arrayed" was the central object of Grecian 
worship. 

Much in this had a germ of truth — more was false. This 
principle, which is true, was evidently stated: The Divine, 
under the limitations of humanity, is the only worship of 
which man is capable. Demonstrably, for man can not con- 
ceive that which is not in his own mind. He may worship 
what is below himself, or that which is in himself resembling 
God ; but attributes of which from his own nature he has no 
conception, he clearly can not adore. 

The only question therefore is. What he shall reckon di- 
vine, and in alliance with God ? If power, then he worships 
as the Hindoo; if life, then as the Egyptian; if physical and 
intellectual beauty, then as the Greek. 

Observe, they wanted some living image of God contain- 
ing something more truly divine to supplant their own. For 
still, in spite of their versatile and multifarious conceptions, 
the illimitable Unknown remained, to which an altar stood in 
Athens. They wanted humanity in its glory — they asked 
for a Son of Man. 

Christ is Deity under the limitations of humanity. But 
there is presented in Christ for worship, not power, nor beau- 
ty, nor physical life, but the moral image of God's perfec- 
tions. Through the heart, and mind, and character of Jesus 
it was that the Divinest streamed. Divine character^ that 
was given in Christ to worship. 

Another error. The Greek worshipped all that was in 
man. Every feeling had its beauty and its divine origin. 
Hence thieving had its patron deity, and treachery, and cun- 
ning ; and lust had its temple erected for abominable wor- 
ship. All that was human had its sanction in the example 
of some god. 

Christ corrects this. Not all that is human is divine. 
There is a part of our nature kindred with God : the strength- 
caning of that, by mixture with God's spirit, is our true and 



Second Advent LectMre, 1 3 7 

proper humanity — regeneration of soul. There is another 
part whereby we are related to the brutes : our animal pro- 
pensities, our lower inclinations, our corrupted will. And 
whoever lives in that, and strengthens that, sinks not to the 
level of the brutes, but below them, to the level of the de- 
mons : for he uses an immortal spirit to degrade himself: 
and the immortal joined with evil, as the life to the body, is 
demoniacal. 

In conclusion, remark, In all this system one thing was 
wanting — the sense of sin. The Greek worshipped the beau- 
tiful, adored the human, deified the world : of course this wor- 
ship found no place for sin. The Greek would not have spok- 
en to you of sin : he would have told you of departure from 
a right line ; want of moral harmony ; discord within : he 
would have said that the music of your soul was out of tune. 
Christ came to convince the world of sin. And after Him 
began to brood upon the hearts of Christendom that deep 
cloud that rests upon the conscience which has been called 
into vitality of action and susceptibility. 

For this Greece had no remedy. The universe has no rem- 
edy but one. There is no prescription for the sickness of the 
heart, but that which is written in the Redeemer's blood. 



XII. 
SECOND ADVENT LECTURE. 

THE EOMAN^. 

*' I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians ; both to the wises, 
and to the unwise. So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gos- 
pel to you that are at Rome also. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of 
Christ : for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth ; 
to the Jew first, and also to the Greek." — Rom. i. 14-16. 

The Advent of Christ is the gulf which separates ancient 
from modern history. The dates B.C. and a.d. are not arbi- 
trary but real division. His coming; is the crisis of the world's 
history. It was the moment from whence light streamed into 
the realms of darkness, and life descended into the regions of 
the grave. It was the new birth of worn-out Humanity. 

Last Thursday we considered the effects of this Advent on 
Greece. We found the central principle of Grecian life to be 
worldliness. The Greek saw, sought, and worshipped, noth- 
ing higher than this life, but only this life itself. Hence 



13B Second Advent Lecture, 

Greek religion degenerated into mere taste, which is peroep 
tion of the beautiful. The result on character was three-fold : 
Restlessness, which sent the Greek through this world with 
his great human heart unsatisfied, fickle in disposition, and 
ever inquiring, with insatiable curiosity, after some new 
thing. Licentiousness ; for whosoever attaches his heart to 
the outward beauty, without worshipping chiefly in it that 
moral beauty of which all else is but the type and suggestion, 
necessarily, slowly, it may be, but inevitably, sinks down and 
down into the deepest abyss of sensual existence. Lastly, 
unbelief. The Greek, seeing principally this world, lost his 
hold upon the next. For the law of faith is, that a man can 
only believe what is already in his spirit. He believes as he 
is. The Apostle Paul writes in astonishment to these Greeks 
(of Corinth), "How say some among you there is no resurrec- 
tion of the dead?" But the thing was explicable. Paul was 
" dying daily." The outward life decayed ; the inner grew 
and lived with more vitality every day. He felt the life to 
come in which he believed. But the Corinthians, leading an 
easy, luxurious life, how could it be a reality to them? How 
could they believe in immortality, in whom the immortal 
scarcely stirred, or only feebly ? To these the apostle felt 
bound to preach the living Gospel. " I am debtor to the 
Greeks." 

To-day, we turn to the Roman nation, its religion, and its 
life. At the time of which the New Testament speaks, Greece 
had been nearly a century and a half a province of Rome. 
In the language of Daniel, the kingdom of brass had given 
way to the kingdom of iron. The physical might of Rome 
had subdued Greece, but the mind of Greece had mastered 
Rome. The Greeks became the teachers of their conquerors. 
The deities of Greece were incorporated into the national 
faith of Rome. Greek literature became the education of the 
Roman youth. Greek philosophy was almost the only phi- 
losophy the Roman knew, Rome adopted Grecian arts, and 
was insensibly moulded by contact with Grecian life. So 
that the world in name and government was Roman, but in 
feeling and civilization Greek. 

If, therefore, we would understand Roman life, we must 
contemplate it at an earlier period, when it was free from 
Greek influence, and purely exhibited its own idiosyncracies. 

The nation which we contemplate to-day was a noble one 
— humanly, one of the noblest that the world has seen. 
Next to the Jewish, the very highest. We may judge from 
the fact of St. Paul's twice claiming his Roman citizenship, 
and feeling the indignation of a Roman citizen at the indig- 



The Roman, 139 

nity of chastisement. And this too in an age when the name 
had lost its brightness — when a luxurious, wealthy Greek could 
purchase his freedom. Claudius Lysias bought it " with a 
large sum of money." And yet we may conceive what it 
had been once, when even the faint lustre of its earlier dignity 
could inspire a foreigner, and that foreigner a Jew, and that 
Jew a Christian, with such respect. 

At the outset, then, we have a rare and high-minded peo ' 
pie and their life, to think of They who have imbibed the 
spirit of its writers from their youth can neither speak nor 
think of it without enthusiasm. Scarcely can we forbear it 
even in the pulpit. Nor is this an unchristian feeling, earth- 
ly, to be checked ; for in order to elevate Christianity, it is 
not necessary to vilify heathenism. To exalt revelation, we 
need not try to show that natural religion has no truths. 
To exhibit the blessings of the Advent, it is not needful to 
demonstrate that man was brutalized without it. It is a 
poor, cowardly system which can only rise by the degrada- 
tion of all others. Whatever is true belongs to the kingdom 
of the truth. The purer the creed, the higher the character, 
the nobler the men who, without revelation, signally failed at 
last, the more absolute is the necessity of a Hedeemer, and 
the more are we constrained to refer gratefully all blessings 
to His Advent. 

We take three points : the public and private life of Rome, 
and its moral and inevitable decay at last. 

I. The public life of Rome. 

First, I notice the spirit of its religion. The very word 
shows what that was. Religion^ a Roman word, means ob- 
ligation, a binding power. Very different from the corre- 
sponding Greek expression, which implies worship by a sen- 
suous ceremonial (threskeia). 

The Roman began, like the Jew, from law. He started 
from the idea of duty. But there was an important differ- 
ence. The Jew was taught duty or obedience to the law of 
a personal, holy God. The Roman obeyed, as his Etruscan 
ancestors taught him, a fate or will, and with very different 
results. But at present we only observe the lofty character 
of the early religion which resulted from such a starting-point. 

The early history of Rome is wrapped in fable ; but the 
fable itself is worth much, as preserving the spirit of the old 
life when it does not preserve the facts. Accordingly, the 
tradition taught that the building of Rome was done in obe- 
dience to the intimations of the will of Heaven. It was re- 
built in a site selected not by human prudence, but by a voice 



140 Second Advent Lecture, 

divinely guided. Its first great legislator (Numa) is repre 
sented as giving laws, not from a human heart, but after se« 
cret communion with the superhuman. It was the belief of 
Roman writers that the early faith taught access to God only 
through the mind ; that therefore no images, but only tem* 
pies, were found in Rome during the first two centuries of 
her existence. No bloody sacrifices defiled the city. War 
itself was a religious act ; solemnly declared by a minister of 
religion casting a spear into the enemy's territory. Nay, we 
even find something in spirit resembling the Jewish sabbath ; 
the command that during the rites of religion no traffic 
should go on, nor workman's hammer break the consecrated 
silence, but that men should devoutly contemplate God. 

Here was a high, earnest, severe religion. 

Now this resulted in government, as its highest earthly ex^ 
pression. Duty — and therefore law on earth — as a copy of 
the will of Heaven. Different nations seem, consciously or 
unconsciously, destined by God to achieve difierent missions. 
The Jew had the highest : to reveal to the world holiness. 
The Oriental stands as a witness to the reality of the Invisi- 
ble above the Visible. The Greek reminded the world of 
eternal beauty; and the destiny of the Roman seems to have 
been to stamp upon the minds of mankind the ideas of law, 
government, order. 

Beauty was not the object of the Roman contemplation, 
nor worship ; nor was harmony. The taste for them might 
be taught, superinduced, but it was not natural. It was not 
indigenous to the soil of his nature. Hence, when Greece was 
reduced to a Roman province, in 146 b.c, the Roman soldiers 
took the noblest specimens of Grecian painting and converted 
them into gambling-tables. 

You may distinguish the difference of the two characters 
from the relics which they have left behind them. The Greek 
produced a statue or a temple, the expression of a sentiment. 
The Roman, standing upon visible fact, dealing with the prac- 
tical, and living in the actual life of men, has left behind him 
works of public usefulness : noble roads which intersect em- 
pires, mighty aqueducts, bridges, enormous excavations for 
draining cities at which we stand astonished ; and, above all, 
that system of law, the slow result of ages of experience, 
which has so largely entered into the modern jurisprudence 
of most European nations. 

One of their own Avriters has distinctly recognized this 
destiny. "It is for others to work brass into breathing 
shape — others may be more eloquent — or describe the 
circling movements of the heavens, and tell the rising of 



The Roinan. 141 

the stars. Thy work, O Koman ! is to rule the nations : 
these be thine acts : to impose the conditions of the world's 
peace, to show mercy to the fallen, and to crush the proud." 

In accordance with this, it is a characteristic fact that 
we find the institutions of Rome referred to inspiration. Not 
a decalogue of private duties, but a code of municipal laws. 
And, turning to the page of Scripture, whenever the Roman 
comes prominently forward, we always find him the organ 
of law, the instrument of public rule and order. Pilate has 
no idea of condemning unjustly: "Why, what evil hath He 
done ?" But he yields at the mention of the source of law, 
the emperor. The Apostle Paul appeals to Caesar, and 
even a corrupt Festus respects the appeal: "Unto Caesar 
shalt thou go." Nor could even the prisoner's innocence 
reverse his own appeal : " This man might have been set at 
liberty if he had not appealed unto Caesar." The tumult at 
Ephesus is stilled by a hint of Roman interference : " We 
are in danger of being called in question for this day's 
uproar." When the angry crowd at Athens, and the equally 
angry mob of the Sanhedrim, was about to destroy Paul, 
again the Roman, Claudius Lysias, comes " with an army, 
and rescues him." 

It was always the same thing. The Roman seems almost 
to have existed to exhibit on earth a copy of the Divine 
order of the universe, the law of the heavenly hierarchies. 

n. Private life. 

We observe the sanctity of the domestic ties. Very 
touching are all the well-known anecdotes: that, for in- 
stance, of the noble Roman matron, who felt, all spotless as 
she was, life-dishonored, and died by her own hand. The 
sacred ness of home was expressed strongly by the idea of 
two guardian deities (Lares and Penates) who watched over 
it. A Roman's own fireside and hearth-stone were almost the 
most sacred spots on earth. There was no battle-cry that 
came so to his heart as that, " For the altar and the hearth." 
How firmly this was rooted in the nation's heart is plain 
from the tradition, that for 170 years no separation took 
place by law between those who had once been united in 
wedlock. 

There is deep importance in this remark, for it was to this 
that Rome owed her greatness. The whole fabric of the 
Commonwealth rose out of the Family. The family was 
the nucleus round which all the rest agglomerated. First, 
the family ; then the clan, made up of the family and its 
dependents or clients; then the tribe; lastly, the nation. 



142 Second Advent Lecture, 

And so the noble structure of the Roman Commonwealth 
arose, compacted and mortised together, but resting on the 
foundation of the hearth-stone. 

Yery different is it in the East. A nation there is a col- 
lection of units, held together by a government. There is 
a principle of cohesion in them, but only such cohesion as 
belongs to the column of sand, supported by the whirlwind : 
when the blast ceases, the atoms fall asunder. When the 
chief is slain or murdered, the nation is in anarchy — the 
family does not exist. Polygamy and infanticide, the bane 
of domestic life, are the destruction, too, of national existence. 

There is a solemn lesson in this. Moral decay in the 
family is the invariable prelude to public corruption. It is 
a false distinction which we make between public integrity 
and private honor. The man whom you can not admit into 
your family, whose morals are corrupt, can not be a pure 
statesman. Whoever studies history will be profoundly 
convinced that a nation stands or falls with the sanctity of 
its domestic ties. Rome mixed with Greece, and learned 
her morals. The Goth was at her gates; but she fell not 
till she was corrupted and tainted at the heart. The domes- 
tic corruption preceded the political. When there was no 
longer purity on her hearth-stones, nor integrity in her Sen- 
ate, then, and not till then, her death-knell was rung. 

We will bless God for our English homes. Partly the 
result of our religion ; partly the result of the climate which 
God has given us, according to the law of compensation by 
which physical evil is repaid by moral blessing ; so that, its 
gloom and darkness making life more necessarily spent 
within doors than it is among Continental nations, our life is 
domestic, and theirs is social. When England shall learn 
domestic maxims from strangers, as Rome from Greece, her 
ruin is accomplished. And this blessing, too, comes from 
Christ — who presided at the marriage-feast at Cana, who 
found a home in the family of Nazareth, and consecrated the 
hearth-stone with everlasting inviolability. 

Let us break up this private life into particulars. 

1. We find manly courage. This too is preserved in a 
',word. Virtue is a Roman word — manhood, courage; for 
courage, manhood, virtue were one word. Words are fossil 
thoughts : you trace the ancient feeling in that word — you 
trace it, too, in the corruption of the word. Among the 
degenerate descendants of the Romans, virtue no longer 
means manhood ; it is simply dilettantism. The decay of 
life exhibits itself in the debasement even of words. 

We dwell on this courage, because it was not merely 



The Roman. 143 

animal daringc Like every thing Roman, it was connected 
with religion. It was duty, obedience to will, self-surrender 
to the public good. The Roman legions subdued the world ; 
but it was not their discipline alone, nor their strength, nor 
their brute daring. It was rather, far, their moral force — • 
a nation whose legendary and historical heroes could thrust 
their hand into the flame, and see it consumed without a 
nerve shrinking ; or come from captivity on parole, advise 
their countrymen against peace, and then go back to torture 
and certain death : or devote themselves by solemn self- 
sacrifice (like the Decii), who could bid sublime defiance 
to pain and count dishonor the only evil. The world must 
bow before such men ; for unconsciously, here was a form 
of the spirit of the Cross — self-surrender, unconquerable 
fidelity to duty, sacrifice for others. And so far as Rome 
had in her that spirit, and so long as she had it, her career 
was the career of all those who in any form, even the low- 
est, take up the Cross: she went forth conquering and to 
conquer. 

2. Deep as Roman greatness was rooted in the courage 
of her men, it was rooted deeper still in the honor of her 
women. I take one significant fact, which exhibits national 
feeling. There was a fire in Rome called eternal, forever 
replenishedo It was the type and symbol of the duration 
of the Republic. This fire was tended by the Vestals — a 
beautifully significant institution. It implied that the dura- 
tion of Rome was co-extensive Avith the preservation of her 
purity of morals. So long as the dignity of her matrons 
and her virgins remained unsullied, so long she would last. 
No longer. Female chastity guarded the Eternal City. 

Here we observe something anticipative of Christianity. 
In the earlier ages after the Advent there were divine honors 
paid to the Queen of Heaven, and the land was covered over 
with houses set apart for celibacy. Of course, rude and 
gross minds can find plenty to sneer at in that institution, 
and doubtless the form of the truth was mistaken enough, as 
all mere forms of doctrine are. But the heart of truth which 
lay beneath all that superstition was a precious one. It was 
this. So long as purity of heart, delicacy of feeling, chastity 
of life, are found in a nation, so long that nation is great — no 
longer. Personal purity is the divinest thing in man and 
woman. It is the most sacred truth which the Church of 
Christ is commissioned to exhibit and proclaim. 

Upon these virtues I observe : The Roman was conspicu- 
ous for the virtues of this earth — honor, fidelity, courage, 
chastity, all manliness ; yet the apostle felt that he had a 



1 4 4 Second Adven t L ecture. 

Gospel to preach to them that were in Rome also. Moral 
virtues are not religious graces. There are two classes of 
excellence. There are men whose lives are full of moral 
principle, and there are others whose feelings are strongly 
devotional. And, strange to say, each of these is found at 
times disjoined from the other. Men of almost spotless 
earthly honor, who scarcely seem to know Avhat reverence 
for things heavenly and devout aspirations towards God 
mean ; men who have the religious instinct, pray with fer- 
vor, kindle with spiritual raptures, and yet are impure in 
their feelings, and fail in matters of common truth and 
honesty. Each of these is but a half man, dwarfed and 
stunted in his spiritual growth. The " perfect man in Christ 
Jesus," who has grown to the "measure of the stature of the 
fullness of Christ," is he who has united these two things : 
who, to the high Roman virtues which adorn this earth, 
has added the sublimer feelings which are the investiture of 
Heaven: in whom "justice, mercy, truth " are but the body 
of which the soul is faith and love. 

Yet observe, these are moral virtues, and morality is not 
religion. Still, beware of depreciating them. Beware of 
talking contemptuously of " mere morality." If we must 
choose between two things which ought never to be divided, 
moral principle and religious sentiment, there is no question 
which most constitutes the character " which ig not far from 
the kingdom of heaven." Devout feelings are common 
enough in childhood, religious emotions, religious warmth, 
instances of which are retailed by the happy parent ; com- 
mon enough, too, in grown men and women — but listen — 
those devout feelings, separate from high principle, do not 
save from immorality : nay, I do believe, are the very step- 
ping-stone towards it. When the sensual is confounded 
with and mistaken for the spiritual ; and merely devout 
warmth is the rich, rank soil of heart in w^hich moral evil 
most surely and most rankly grows — you will not easily 
build Roman virtues upon that. But high principle, which 
is, in other words, the baptism of John, is the very basis on 
which is most naturally raised the superstructure of religious 
faith. Happy, thrice happy he who begins with the law and 
ends with the gospel. 

in. The decline of Roman life. 

1. First came corruption of the moral character. The 
Roman worldliness was of a kind far higher than the Gre- 
cian. In his way the Roman really had the world's good at 
heart. There was a something invisible at which he aimed; 



The Roman. 145 

invisible justice, invisible order, invisible right. Still it was 
only the law on earth — the well-being of this existence. And 
whatever is only of this earth is destined to decay. The 
soul of the Roman, bent on this world's affairs, became secu- 
larized, then animalized, and so at last, when there was little 
left to do, pleasure became his aim, as it had been the Gre- 
cian's. Then came ruin swiftly. When the emperors lived 
for their elaborately contrived life of luxury, when the Roman 
soldier left his country's battles to be fought by mercenaries, 
the doom of Rome was sealed. Yet, because it was a nobler 
worldliness, less sensual and less selfish, the struggle with de- 
cay was more protracted than in Greece. Lofty spirits rose 
to stem the tide of corruption, and the death-throes of Rome 
were long and terrible. She ran a mighty career of a thou- 
sand years. 

2. Skepticism and superstition went hand in hand. An 
example of the former we have in Pilate's question, " What 
is truth ?" An example of the latter in the superstitious 
belief of the inhabitants of Lystra that Paul and Barnabas 
were "gods come to them in the likeness of men." And this 
probably was a tolerably accurate picture of the state of 
Roman feeling. The lower classes sunk in a deba"sed super- 
stition — the educated classes, too intellectual to believe in it, 
and yet having nothing better to put in its stead. Or per- 
haps there was also a superstition which is only another 
name for skepticism : infidelity trembling at itself, shrinking 
from its own shadow. There is a fearful question for which 
the soul must find an answer — the mystery of its own being 
and destinies. Men looked into their own souls, and, listen- 
ing, heard only an awful silence there. ISTo resjoonse came 
from the world without. Philosophy had none to give. 
And then men, terrified at the progress of infidelity, more 
than half distrusting their own tendencies, took refuge in 
adding superstition to superstition. They brought in the 
gods of Greece, and Egypt, and the East : as if multiplying 
the objects of reverence strengthened the spirit of reverence 
in the soul; as if every new sacredness was a barrier be- 
tween them and the dreadful abyss of uncertainty into which 
they did not dare to look. 

This is as true now as then. Superstition is the refuge of 
a skeptical spirit, which has a heart too devout to dare to be 
skeptical. Men tremble at new theories, new views, the 
spread of infidelity, and they think to fortify themselves 
against these by multiplying the sanctities which they rever- 
ence. But all this will not do. Superstition can not do the 
work of faith, and give repose or peace. It is not by multi 



146 Second Advent Lecture, 

plying ceremonies — it is not by speaking of holy things with 
low, bated breath — it is not by entrenching the soul behind 
the infallibility of a church, or the infallibility of the words 
and sentences of a book — it is not by shutting out inquiry, 
and resenting every investigation as profane, that you can 
arrest the progress of infidelity. Faith, not superstition, is 
the remedy. 

There is a grand fearlessness in faith. He who in his 
heart of hearts reverences the good, the true, the holy — that 
is, reverences God — does not tremble at the apparent success 
of attacks upon the outworks of his faith. They may shake 
those who rested on those outworks — they do not move him 
whose soul reposes on the truth itself He needs no props 
or crutches to support his faith. He does not need to multi- 
ply the objects of his awe in order to keep dreadful doubt 
away. Founded on a Rock, Faith can afibrd to gaze undis 
mayed at the approaches of Infidelity. 

3. In Rome religion degenerated into allegiance to the 
State. In Greece, as it has been truly said, it ended in taste. 
In Rome it closed with the worship of the emperor. Noth- 
ing shows the contrast between Greek and Roman feeling 
more strongly than this. In Greece the poet became the 
prophet, and the artist was the man divinely inspired. In 
Rome the deification of the emperor, as the symbol of gov- 
ernment, was the point towards which, unsuspected, but by 
a sure and inevitable consecutiveness, the national feeling for 
ages had been tending. 

And the distinction between the Christian and the Roman 
tone of feeling is no less strikingly contrasted in the very 
same allegiance. Sacrament, perhaps, is the highest word of 
symbolical life in both. It is a Roman word. In Rome it 
meant an oath of allegiance to the Senate and Roman people. 
Nothing higher the Roman knew. In the Christian Church 
it is also the oath of highest fidelity ; but its import there is 
this : " Here we ofier and present unto thee, Lord, our- 
selves, our souls and bodies, to be a living sacrifice." 

In this contrast of the sacramental vows, as I have re- 
marked before, were perceptible the difierent tendencies of 
the two starting-points of revealed religion and Roman. 
Judaism began from law or obligation to a holy person. 
Roman religion began from obedience to a mere will. Ju< 
daism ended in Christianity, whose central principle is joy- 
ful surrender to One whose name is Love. The religion of 
Rome ended, among the nobler, as Cato and the Antonines, 
in the fatalism of a sublime but loveless stoicism, whose es- 
sential spirit is submission to a destiny ; among the ordinary 



The Roman, 147 

men, in mere zeal for the state, more or less earthly. It stiff 
ened into stoicism, or degenerated in public spirit. 

4. The last step we notice is the decline of religion into ex- 
pediency. It is a startling thing to see men protecting popu- 
lar superstitions which they despise ; taking part with solemn 
gravity in mummeries which in their heart they laugh at. 
Yet such, we are told, was the state of things in Rome. It 
is a trite and often quoted observation of a great Roman, 
that one minister of religion could scarcely meet another 
without a smile upon his countenance, indicating conscious- 
ness of a solemn mockery. And an instance of this, I believe, 
we have in the Acts of the Apostles. The town-clerk or mag- 
istrate of Ephesus stilled the populace by a kind of accom- 
modation to their prejudices much in the same way in which 
a nurse would soothe a passionate child. Apparently, as we 
are told, he belonged to the friends of Paul ; and we can 
scarcely forbear a smile at the solemn gravity with which he 
assures the people that there could be no doubt that the im- 
age fell down from Jupiter : no question throughout all Asia 
and the world about the greatness of the " great goddess 
Diana." 

For there were cultivated minds which had apprehended 
some of the truths of Christianity — philosophers who were 
enlightened far beyond their age. But a line of martyred 
philosophers had made them cautious. They made a com- 
promise. They enjoyed their own light, kept silence, and 
left the rest in darkness. The result was destruction of their 
own moral being ; for the law of truth is that it can not be 
shut up without becoming a dead thing, and mortifying the 
whole nature. Xot the truth which a man knows, but that 
which he says and lives, becomes the soul's life. Truth can not 
bless except when it is lived for, proclaimed and suffered for. 

This was the plan of the enlightened when the Saviour 
came. And this is the lowest step of a nation's fall, when 
the few who know the truth refuse to publish it ; when gov- 
ernments patronize superstition as a mere engine for govern- 
ing ; when the ministers of religion only half believe the 
dogmas which they teach, dare not even say to one another 
what they feel and what they doubt ; when they dare not be 
true to their convictions for fear of an Ephesian mob. 

Therefore it was necessary that One should come into the 
world who should be true — the truest of all that are woman- 
born ; whose life was truth ; who from everlasting had been 
the truth. It was necessary that He should come to preach 
the Gospel to the poor, to dare to say to the people some 
truths which the philosophers dared not say, and other truths 



148 



Third Advent Lecture, 



of which no philosopher had ever dreamed. The penalty of 
that true life was the sacrifice which is the world's Atone* 
ment. Men saw the Mortal die. But others saw the Im> 
mortal rise to take His place at the right hand of Power : 
and the Spirit which has been streaming out ever since from 
that life and death is the world's present Light, and shall be 
its everlasting Life. 



xm. 
THIRD ADVENT LECTURE. 

THE BARBAEIAN. 

"And when they were escaped, then they Icnew that the island was called 
Melita. And the barbarous people showed us no little kindness: for they 
kindled a fire, and received us every one, because of the present rain, and 
because of the cold. And when Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks, and 
laid them on the fire, there came a viper out of the heat, and fastened on his 
hand. And when the barbarians saw the venomous beast hang on his hand, 
they said among themselves, No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though 
he hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffereth not to live. And he shook 
off the beast into the fire, and felt no harm. Howbeit they looked when he 
should have swollen, or fallen do\\Ti dead suddenly : but after they had 
looked a great while, and saw no harm come to him, they changed their 
minds, and said that he Avas a god. In the same quarters were possessions 
of the chief man of the island, whose name was Publius ; who received us, 
and lodged us three days courteously. " — Acts xxviii. 1-7. 

Of the four divisions of the world at the time of the Ad- 
vent, two have already been reviewed. The Greek, seeing 
the right only on its side of beauty, ended in mere intellect- 
ual refinement. The artist took the place of God, and genius 
stood for inspiration. The Roman's destiny was diflerent. 
His was not the kingdom of burnished brass, but the king- 
dom of iron. He set out with the great idea of duty and 
law : exhibited in consequence the austere simplicity of pure 
domestic life, in public affairs government and order : stamp 
ing upon the world the great idea of obedience to law. In 
the decline of Rome the results of this were manifest. After 
a mighty career of a thousand years Rome had run out her 
course. Among the loftier minds who stood out protesting 
against her corruption, and daring in a corrupted age to be- 
lieve in the superiority of riglit to enjoyment, grand con- 
tempt for pleasure, sublime defiances of pain told out the 
dying agonies of the iron kingdom, wortliy of the heart of 
eteel which beat beneath the Roman's robe. This was stoi- 



The Barbarian. 149 

cism : the Grecian philosophy which took deepest root, as 
might have been expected, in the soil of Roman thought. 
Stoicism was submission to a destiny : hard, rigid, loveless 
submission. Its language was Must. It must be, and man's 
highest manliness is to submit to the inevitable. It is right 
because it must be so. Besides these higher ones, there were 
others who carried out the idea of duty in quite another di- 
rection. With the mass of the nation, reverence for law 
passed into homage to the symbol of law — loyalty to the 
Government; its highest expression being the sacramental 
homage to the nation's authority. So that, as I fiave alread} 
said, the Roman spirit stiffened into stoicism, and degener- 
ated into worship of the emperor. This was not accidental, 
it was the inevitable result of the idea. It might have taken 
half the time, or ten times as long ; but at last the germ 
must have ripened into that fruit and no other. The Roman 
began with obedience to will. 

Law, meaning obedience to a holy God, passes by a nat- 
ural transition into the Gospel : that is, reverential duty to a 
person becomes the obedience of love at last, which obeys 
because the beautifulness of obedience is perceived. The 
Jew began in severity, ended in beauty. The Roman began 
in severity, ended in rigidity, or else relaxation. To him the 
Advent came proclaiming the Lord of love instead of the co 
ercive necessity of a lifeless fate. 

To the Greek Avorshipper of beauty, the Advent came with 
an announcement of an inner beauty. He who was to them, 
and all such, " a Root out of a dry ground, with no form or 
comeliness," with nothing to captivate a refined taste, or 
gratify an elegant sensibility, lived a life which was divine 
and beautiful. His religion, as contrasted with the Grecian, 
supplementing it, and confirming in it what was true, " was 
the worship of the Lord in the beauty of holiness." 

The third department is the necessity of the Advent for 
the Barbarian world. 

By Barbarian was meant any religion but the Roman or 
the Greek — a contemptuous term, the spirit of which is com- 
mon enough in all ages. Just as now every narrow sect 
monopolizes God, claims for itself an exclusive heaven, con- 
temptuously looks on all the rest of mankind as sitting in 
outer darkness, and complacently consigns myriads whom 
God has made to His uncovenanted mercies, that is, to prob- 
able destruction, so, in ancient times, the Jew scornfully des- 
ignated all nations but his own as Gentiles ; and the Roman 
and Greek, each retaliating in his way, treated all nations 
but his own under the common epithet of Barbarians. 



1 50 Third Advent Lecture, 

We shall confiDe ourselves to-day to a single case of bar- 
barian life. We shall not enter into the religion of our own 
ancestors, the Celts and Teutonic nations, who were barbari- 
ans then, nor that of the Scythians or the Africans. One in- 
stance will be sufficient. 

Twice in his recorded history St. Paul came in contact 
with barbarians — twice he was counted as a god. Once 
among the semi-barbarians of Lycaonia, at Lystra — once here 
at Melita. 

There is a little uncertainty about the identification of this 
Melita. It 'was a name shared by two islands — Malta, and 
Melida in the Adriatic. But it seems to be established be- 
yond all reasonable doubt that it was on Malta, not on Me- 
lida, that St. Paul was wrecked. The chief objection to this 
view is, that immediately before the wreck we are told — • 
chap, xxvii. 27 — that they were " driven up and down in 
Adria." But this is satisfactorily answered by the fact that 
the name Adriatic was applied often loosely to all the sea 
round Sicily. Two great arguments in favor of Malta then 
remain : After leaving the island, the apostle touched at Sy- 
racuse, and so went on to Rhegium and Puteoli. This is the 
natural direction from Malta to Rome, but not from Melida. 
Then besides, " barbarians " will not apply to the inhabitants 
of Melida. They were Greeks: whereas the natives of MaU 
ta, living imder Roman government, were originally Cartha- 
ginians, who had been themselves a Phoenician colony. The 
epithet is perfectly correct as applied to them. 

It is the Carthaginian or Phoenician religion, then, which 
moulded the barbarian life, that we examine to-day. We 
take three points. 

I. Barbarian virtues. 
11. Barbarian idea of retribution. 
m. Barbarian conception of Deity. 

I. Barbarian virtues. Two errors have been held on the 
subject of natural goodness. The first, that of those who 
deny to fallen man any goodness at all, and refuse to admit 
even kindliness of feeling. In the language of a celebrated 
and popular expounder of this view, "man in his natural 
state is one-half beast and one-half devil." This is the eff*ect 
of a system. No man in his heart believes that. No moth- 
er ever gazed upon her child, baptized or unbaptized, and 
thought so. Men are better than their creed. Their hearts 
are more than a match for their false theological system. 
Beneath the black skin of the African tliere runs a blood aa 
warm as that wliich is in the blue veins of the Christian, 



The Barbarian. 1 5 \ 

Among the civilized heathen, the instinctive feelings are aa 
kindly and as exquisitely delicate as they were ever found 
in the bosom of the baptized. Accordingly, we find here 
these natural barbarian virtues of hospitality and sympathy. 
The shipwrecked mariners, wet and cold, were received in 
Melita with a warm, compassionate welcome. The people of 
the island did not say, " Depart in peace, be ye warmed and 
filled." They gave them those things which were necessary 
for the body. And a Christian contemplating this, gave this 
distinct testimony, " The barbarous people showed us no lit' 
tie kindness." 

The second error is the opposite one of placing too high a 
value on these natural virtues. There is a class of writers 
who talk much of early unsophisticated times. They tell of 
the days " when wild m woods the noble savage ran." They 
speak of pastoral simplicity, and the reverence and piety of 
mountain life. According to them, civilization is the great 
corrupter. But the truth is, the natural good feelings of hu- 
man nature are only instincts: no more moral than a long 
sight or a delicate sense of hearing. The keen feelings of 
the child are no guaranty of future principle — perhaps rath- 
er the reverse. The profuse hospitality of the mountaineer, 
who rarely sees strangers, and to whom gold is little worth, 
becomes shrewd and selfish calculation so soon as temptation 
from passing traffic is placed in his w^ay. You may travel 
among savages who treat you, as a stranger, with courtesy, 
but yet feed on the flesh of their enemies. And these Meli- 
tans, who " showed no little kindness " to the wrecked crew, 
belonged to a stock who, in the most civilized days of Car- 
thage, ofiered human sacrifice, and after every successful battle 
■^ath the Romans burnt the chief prisoners alive as a thank- 
oifering to Heaven. If we trace them still farther back, we 
find their Phoenician ancestors in the Old Testament tainted 
with the same practice, and the Hebrews themselves imbib- 
ing it from them, so as to be perpetually arraigned by their 
prophets on the charge of making their sons and daughters 
"pass through the fire to Baal." They could be kind to 
Btrangers, and cruel to enemies. 

The Advent of Christ brought a new spirit into the world. 
"A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one an- 
other." That was not the new part. The Melitans would not 
have disagreed with that. ... "As I have loved you, that 
ye love one another." "As I have loved you," . . . .that 
makes all new. So also 1 John ii. 7, 8. The " old command- 
ment " was old enough. Barbarians felt in their hearts. But 
the same commandment with " true light " shining on il V^a 
different indeed. 



152 Third Advent Lecture. 

" Love your neighbor, hate your enemy." Carthaginians 
obeyed that. Hear the law of love expounded by Himself. 
" But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that 
curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them 
which despitefully use you and persecute you. For if ye 
love them which love you, what do ye more than others? 
Do not even . . . (the barbarians) . . . the same ?" This is 
Christianity — that is, the mind of Christ. 
^ Remark, too, the principle on Avhich this is taught. " That 
ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven : 
for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, 
and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." Not upon 
merely personal authority; not by a law graven on stone, 
nor even printed in a book, to be referred to, chapter and 
verse ; but on the principle of the imitation of God. His 
heart interpreted the universe — He read its " open secret," 
which is open to all who have the heart to feel it, secret to 
all others. A secret, according to Him, to be gathered from 
the rain as it fell on the just and the unjust, from the dew 
of heaven, from the lily, and from the fowls of the air, from 
the wheat, from every law and every atom. This was His 
revelation. He revealed God. He sjoelled for us the mean- 
ing of all this perplexing, unintelligible world. He pro- 
claimed its hidden meaning to be Love. So He converted 
rude barbarian instincts into Christian graces — by expand- 
ing their sphere and purifying them of selfishness — causing 
them to be regulated by principle, and elevating them into 
a conscious imitation of God in His revealed character. 

n. The Barbarian idea of retribution. 

The Apostle Paul was one of those who are formed to be 
the leaders of the world. Foremost in persecution, foremost 
in Christianity ("nothing behind the chiefest apostles ") fore- 
most in the shipwreck, his voice the calmest, his heart the 
stoutest, his advice the wisest in the tumult; foremost, too, 
when all was over, not as a prisoner, but actively engaged 
for the general good, it is Paul who is gathering the sticks 
to make the fire." From those sticks a viper sprung and fas- 
tened on his hand, and the first impression of the barbarians 
was, " No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he 
hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance sufiereth not to live." 

This is the very basis of all natural religion — the idea of 
the connection between guilt and retribution. In some 
form or other it underlies all mythologies. The sleepless, 
never-dying avengers of wrong — the Nemesis who presides 
over retribution — the vensjeance which suflfereth not the 



The Barbarian. 153 

murderer to live — the whips and scorpions of the Furies^ 
it seems the first instinct of religion. 

In the Barbarian conception of it, however, there was 
something gross, corporeal, and dangerous ; because they 
misinterpreted natural laws into vengeance. Yet there is a 
proneness in man to judge so. We expect that nature will 
execute the chastisements of the spiritual world. Hence all 
nature becomes to the imagination leagued against the 
transgressor. The stars in their courses fight against Sisera ; 
the wall of Siloam falls on guilty men ; the sea will not carry 
the criminal, nor the plank bear him — the viper stings — 
every thing is a minister of wrath. On this conviction na- 
tions constructed their trial by ordeal. The guilty man's 
sword would fail in the duel, and the foot would strike and 
be burnt by the hot ploughshare. Some idea of this sort 
lurks in all our minds. We picture to ourselves the spectres 
of the past haunting the nightly bed of the tyrant. We take 
for granted that there is an avenger making life miserable. 

But experience corrects all this. The tyrant's sleep is 
often as sweet and sound as the infant's. The sea will 
wreck an apostle, and bear a murderer triumphantly. The 
viper stings the innocent turf- cutter. The fang of evil 
pierces the heel of the noblest as he treads it down. It is 
the poetry of man's heart, not the reality of the universe, 
which speaks of the vengeance which pursues guilt with un- 
relenting steps to slay ; only in poetry is this form of jus- 
tice found ; only in poetry does the fire refuse to burn the 
innocent ; only in poetry can Purity lay her hand on the 
fawning lion's mane. If we ask where these Melitans got 
their idea of retribution, the reply is, out of their own 
hearts. They felt the eternal connection between wrong- 
doing and penalty. The penalty they would have executed 
on murder was death. They naturally threw this idea of 
theirs into the character of God, and blended together what 
was theirs and what is His. This is valuable as a proof of 
the instinctive testimony of man's heart to the realities of 
retribution. It is utterly worthless as a testimony to the 
form in which retributive justice works, because it is not 
borne out by the facts of life. 

Again, that notion was false, in that it expected vengeance 
for flagrant crime only. " This man is a murderer." There 
is a common and superstitious feeling now to that effect, 
" Murder will out :" as if God had set a black mark on mur- 
der — as if, because it is unlikely to escape detection in a 
country where every man's hand is against the murderer, 
impunity was not common enough in countries where hu« 



154 Third Advent Lecture, 

man life is held cheap. The truth is, we think much of 
crime, little of sin. There is many a murderer executed 
whose heart is pure and whose life is white, compared with 
those of many a man who lives a respectable and even hon- 
ored life. David was a murderer. The Pharisees had com- 
mitted no crime, but their heart was rotten at the core. 
There was in it the sin which has no forgiveness. It is not 
a Christian but a Barbarian estimate, which ranks crime 
above sin, and takes murder for the chief of sins marked out 
for Heaven's vengeance. 

As information increased, this idea of retribution disap- 
pears. Natural laws are understood, and retribution van- 
ishes. Then often comes Epicureanism or Atheism. "All 
things come alike to all : there is one end to the righteous 
and to the sinner ; to the clean and to the unclean : to him 
that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not." This is the 
feeling of the voluptuary of Ecclesiastes. If so, then the in- 
ference suggests itself to Epicurean indolence — " Let us eat 
and drink" — it is all the same. Or the skeptical feeling 
comes thus : " Yerily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and 
washed my hands in innocency." For assuredly there is no 
vengeance such as this which suffers not the murderer to 
live, but arms the powers of nature against him. Therefore 
why do right instead of wrong ? 

Thus the idea of retribution is gone for those who see no 
deeper than the outward chance of penalty. 

The Advent of Christ brought deeper and truer views. 
It taught what sin is, and what suffering is. It showed the 
Innocent on the Cross bearing the penalty of the world's sin, 
but Himself still the Son of God, with whom the Father was 
not angry, but "well pleased." 

The penal agonies of sin are chiefly those which are exe- 
cuted within. " Vengeance," said the Melitans, " suffereth 
not the murderer to live." " Whosoever slayeth Cain," said 
God^ " vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold." Cain, 
the murderer, lives — Christy the holy, dies. Cain is to us 
the dread type of hell. To live ! that is hell, to live when 
you fain would die. There is such a thing as being salted 
with fire, a never annihilating but still consuming torture. 
You may escape the viper and the wreck. You may by 
prudence make this world painless, more or less. You can 
not escape yourself Go where you will, you carry with 
you a soul degraded, its power lost, its finer sensibilities de- 
stroyed. Worse than the viper's tooth is the punishment 
of no longer striving after goodness, or aspiring after the life 
of God. Just as the man can not see tliroui^h the glass on 



The Barbarian. 155 

which he breathes, sin darkens the windows of the soul. 
You can not look out even to know the glories of the fair 
world from which your soul excludes itself There is no 
punishment equal to the punishment of being base. To sink 
from sin to sin, from infamy to infamy, that is the fearful 
retribution which is executed in the spiritual world. You 
are safe, go where you will, from the viper : as safe as if 
you were the holiest of God's children. The fang is in your 
soul. 

ni. The Barbarian conception of Deity. 

When the viper fell off, and Paul was left uninjured, they 
changed their mind and said that he was a god. 

Observe first, this implied a certain advance in religious 
notions. There is a stage of worship prior to that of man- 
worship. Man finds himself helpless among the powers of 
nature, and worships the forces themselves which he finds 
around him. This takes different forms. The highest is the 
worship of that host of heaven from which Job professed 
himself to be free. With some it is the adoration of lifeless 
things : the oak which has been made sacred by the light- 
ning-stroke ; the " meteoric stone " which fell down from 
Jupiter. So the Israelites adored the brazen serpent, with 
which power had once been in connection. Evidently there 
can be no holy influence in this. Men worship them by fear, 
fortify themselves by charms and incantations : do not try 
to please God by being holy, but defend themselves from 
danger by jugglery. The Christians of the early ages car- 
ried about bits of consecrated bread to protect themselves 
from shipwreck. 

Besides this, men have worshipped brute life — some ani- 
mal, exhibiting a limited quality, which is yet reckoned a 
type of the Divine. The haw^k-eyed deities of Egypt, for in- 
stance, implied omniscience. Beast-worship was that of 
Egypt. Israel learned it there, and in an early stage of their 
history imitated the highest form which they knew, that of 
Apis, in their golden calf 

It is quite clear that the Melitans were in a stage beyond 
this. It is a step when men rise from the worship of lifeless 
things to that of animals — another when they rise to worship 
human qualities ; for they are nearest the Divine. Perhaps 
a step higher still, when, like the early Romans, they wor- 
ship a principle like Destiny, separate from all shape. They 
were in the stage of worshipping what is human. 

2. But in this worship of the human we have to distinguish 
that it was the adoration of the marvellous, not the rever- 



1 56 Third Advent Lecture. 

ence for the good. It was not Paul's character to which 
they yielded homage. It was only to the wonderful mys- 
tery of, as they supposed, miraculous escape. So, too, at 
Lystra. It was the miracle which they chiefly saw. 

All that would pass away when they knew that he was a 
man of like passions with themselves, or when they were in- 
formed that it was a providential escape which might have 
happened to any ordinary man. When the savage sees the 
flash of European fire-arms he kneels as to a god ; but when 
he has learned its use, his new religion is gone. When the 
Americans first saw the winged ships of Spain, they thought 
that the deities spoke in thunder; but when they discovered 
the secret of their humanity, the worship ceased. And thus 
science is every day converting the religion of mere wonder 
into Atheism. The mere worship of the mysterious has but 
a limited existence. As you teach laws, you undermine that 
religion. Men cease to tremble. The Laplander would no 
longer be awed by the eclipse if he knew how to calculate it 
with unerring accuracy. The savage's dread of lightning as 
the bolt of God, is over when he sees the philosopher draw 
it from the clouds, and experimentalize on it in his laboratory. 
The awe created by a pestilence is passed, when it is found 
to be strictly under the guidance of natural laws. And the 
Romanist, or the semi-Romanist, who^e religion is chiefly a 
sense of the mysterious, the solemn, and the awful, and 
whose flesh creeps when he sees a miracle in the consecration 
of the sacraments, ends, as is well "known, in infidelity, when 
enlightenment and reason have struck the ground of false 
reverence from beneath his feet. 

It is upon this indisputable basis that the mightiest sys 
tem of modern Atheism has been built. The great founder 
of that system divides all human history into three periods. 
The first, in which the Supernatural is believed in ; and a 
personal agent is believed in as the cause of all phenomena. 
The second, in which metaphysical abstractions are assumed 
as Causes. The third, the Positive stage, in which nothing 
is expected but the knowledge of sequences by experience ; 
the Absolute, that lies beneath all phenomena, being forever 
unknowable, and a God, if there be a God, undiscoverable by 
ihe intellect of man. 

This conclusion is irrefragable. Granted that the only ba- 
sis of religion is awe, a worship of the marvellous, then ver- 
ily, there remains nothing for the human race to end in but 
blank and ghastly Atheism, 

Therefore has the Redeemer's Advent taught a deeper truth 
to man. The Apostle Paul spoke almost slightingly of the 



The Barbarian. 157 

marvellous. " Covet earnestly the best gifts : yet show 1 
unto you a more excellent way. Though I speak with the 
tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I am become 
as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." Love is diviner 
than all wondrous powers. 

So, too, the Son of God came into this world, depreciating 
the merely mysterious. "An evil and adulterous genera- 
tion seeketh after a sign. No sign shall be given to it." 
"Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe." 
Nay, His own miracles themselves, so far as the merely won- 
drous in them was concerned. He was willing, on one occa- 
sion at least, to place on the same level with the real or sup- 
posed ones of exorcists among themselves. " If I by Beel- 
zebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out ?" 
It was not the power, nor the supernatural in them, which 
proved them divine. It was their peculiar character — their 
benevolence, their goodness, their love — which manifested 
Deity. 

Herein lies the vast fallacy ot the French skeptic. The 
worship of the merely Supernatural must, as science pro- 
gresses, legitimately end in Atheism. Yes, all science re- 
moves the Cause of causes farther and farther back from hu- 
man ken, so that the baffled intellect is compelled to confess 
at last we can not find it. But " the world by wisdom knew 
not God." There is a power in the soul, quite separate from 
the intellect, which sweeps away or recognizes the marvel- 
lous, by which God is felt. Faith stands serenely far above 
the reach of the atheism of science. It does not rest on the 
wonderful, but on the eternal wisdom and goodness of God. 
The revelation of the Son was to proclaim a Father, not a 
mystery. No science can sweep away the everlasting love 
which the heart feels, and which the intellect does not even 
pretend to judge or recognize. And he is safe from the in- 
evitable decay which attends the mere Barbarian worship, 
who has felt that as faith is the strongest power in the mind 
of man, so is love the divinest principle in the bosom of God ^ 
in other words, he who adores God as known in Christ, rath- 
er than trembles before the Unknown — whose homage is 
yielded to Divine Character rather than to Divine Power. 



158 The Principle of the Spiritual HarvesL 



XIV. 
THE PRINCIPLE OF THE SPIRITUAL HARVEST. 

"Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, 
that shall he also reap. For he that sow^eth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap 
corruption ; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life ever- 
lasting." — Gal. vi. 7, 8. 

There is a close analogy between the world of nature 
and the world of spirit. They bear the impress of the same • 
hand ;• and hence the principles of nature and its laws are 
the types and shadows of the Invisible. Just as two books, 
though on different subjects, proceeding from the same pen, 
manifest indications of the thought of one mind, so the 
worlds, visible and invisible, are two books written by the 
same finger, and governed by the same idea. Or rather, 
they are but one book, separated into tv/o only by the nar- 
row range of our ken. For it is impossible to study the uni- 
verse at all without perceiving that it is one system. Be- 
gin with what science you will, as soon as you get beyond 
the rudiments, you are constrained to associate it with an- 
other. 

You can not study agriculture long without finding that 
it absorbs into itself meteorology and chemistry : sciences 
tun into one another till you get the " connection of the sci- 
ences ;" and you begin to learn that one Divine idea con- 
nects the whole in one system of perfect order. 

It was upon this principle that Christ taught. Truths 
come forth from His lips, not stated simply on authority, but 
based on the analogy of the universe. His human mind, in 
perfect harmony with the Divine mind with which it is mix- 
ed, discerned the connection of things, and read the Eternal 
Will in the simplest laws of nature. For instance, if it were 
a question whether God would give His Spirit to them that 
asked, it was not replied to by a truth revealed on His au- 
thority ; the ansAver was derived from facts lying open to all 
men's observation. " Behold the fowls of the air" — " behold 
the lilies of the field " — learn from them the answer to your 
question. A principle was there. God supplies the wants 
which He has created. He feeds the ravens — He clothes tlie 
lilies — He will feed with His Spirit tlie craving spirits of His 
children. 



The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest. 159 

It was on this principle of analogy that St. Paul taught in 
this text. He tells us that there is a law in nature accord- 
ing to which success is proportioned to the labor spent upon 
the work. In kind and in degree, success is attained in 
kind ; for example, he who has sown his field with beech- 
mast does not receive a plantation of oaks ; a literary educa- 
tion is not the road to distinction in arms, but to success in 
letters ; years spent on agriculture do not qualify a man to 
be an orator, but they make him a skillful farmer. Success, 
again, is proportioned to labor in degree, because, ordinarily, 
as is the amount of seed sown, so is the harvest : he who 
studies much will know more than he who studies little. In 
almost all departments it is " the diligent hand which mak- 
eth rich." 

The keen eye of Paul discerned this principle reaching far 
beyond what is seen, into the spiritual realm which is un- 
seen. As tare-seed comes up tares, and wheat-seed wheat ; 
and as the crop in both cases is in proportion to two condi 
tions, the labor and the quantity committed to the ground 
— so in things spiritual, too, whatsoever a man soweth, that 
shall he also reap. Not something else, but " thatP The 
proportion holds in kind — it holds, too, in degree, in spiritual 
things as in natural. " He which soweth sparingly shall 
reap also sparingly ; and he which soweth bountifully shall 
reap also bountifully." If we could understand and rightly 
expound that principle, we should be saved from much of the 
disappointment and surprise which come from extravagant 
and unreasonable expectations. I shall try first to elucidate 
the principle which these verses contain, and then examine 
the two branches of the principle. 

I. The principle is this, " God is not mocked : for whatso 
ever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." 

There are two kinds of good possible to men : one enjoyed 
by our animal being, the other felt and appreciated -by our 
spirits. Every man understands more or less the difierence 
between these two : between prosperity and well-doing — be- 
tween indulgence and nobleness — between comfort and in- 
ward peace — between pleasure and striving after perfection 
— between happiness and blessedness. These are two kinds 
of harvest, and the labor necessary for them respectively is 
of very difierent kinds. The labor which procures the har- 
vest of the one has no tendency to secure the other. 

We will not depreciate the advantages of this world. It 
is foolish and unreal to do so. Comfort, aflfluence, success, 
freedom from care, rank, station — these are in their real way 



1 6o The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest, 

goods ; only the labor bestowed upon them does not procuifl 
one single blessing that is spiritual. 

On the other hand, the seed which is sown for a spiritual 
harvest has no tendency whatever to procure temporal well- 
being. Let us see what are the laws of the sowing and reap 
ing in this department. Christ has declared them : " Bless- 
ed are the pure in heart : for they shall see God." " Bless- 
3d are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness : for 
they shall be filled " (with righteousness). " Blessed are they 
that mourn : for they shall be comforted." You observe, 
the beatific vision of the Almighty — fullness of righteous- 
ness — divine comfort. There is nothing earthly here — it is, 
spiritual results for spiritual labor. It is not said that the 
pure in heart shall be made rich ; nor that they who hunger 
after goodness shall be filled with bread ; nor that they who 
mourn shall rise in life and obtain distinction. Each depart- 
ment has its own aj^propriate harvest — reserved exclusively 
to its own method of sowing. 

Every thing in this world has its price, and the price buys 
tliat^ not something else. Every harvest demands its own 
preparation, and that preparation will not produce another 
sort of harvest. Thus, for example, you can not have at 
once the soldier's renown and the quiet of a recluse's life. 
The soldier pays his price for his glory — sows and reaps. 
His price is risk of life and limb, nights spent on the hard 
ground, a w^eather-beaten constitution. If you will not pay 
that price, you can not have what he has — military reputa- 
tion. You can not enjoy the statesman's influence together 
with freedom from public notoriety. If you sensitively 
shrink from that, you must give up influence ; or else pay 
his price — the price of a thorny pillow, unrest, the chance of 
being to-day a nation's idol, to-morrow the people's execra- 
tion. You can not have the store of information possessed 
by the student, and enjoy robust health : pay his price, and 
you have his reward. His price is an emaciated frame, a do- 
bilitated constitution, a transparent hand, and the rose taken 
out of the sunken cheek. To expect these opposite things : 
a soldier's glory and quiet, a statesman's renown and peace, 
the student's prize and rude health, would be to mock God, 
to reap what has not been sowed. 

Now the mistakes men make, and the extravagant expec- 
tations in which they indulge, are these : they sow for earth, 
and expect to win spiritual blessings, or they sow to the 
Spirit, and then wonder that they have not a harvest of the 
good things of earth. In each case they complain, What 
have I done to be treated so ? 



The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest, 1 6 1 

The unreasonableness of all this appears the moment we 
have understood the conditions contained in this principle, 
" Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." 

It is a common thing to hear sentimental wonderings 
about the unfairness of the distribution of things here. The 
unprincipled get on in life, the saints are kept back. The 
riches and rewards of life fall to the lot of the undeserving. 
The rich man has his good things, and Lazarus his evil things. 
Whereupon it is taken for granted that there must be a fu- 
ture life to make this fair : that if there were none, the con- 
stitution of this world would be unjust. That is, that be- 
cause a man who has sown to the Spirit does not reap to the 
flesh here, he will hereafter ; that the meed of well-doing 
must be somewhere in the universe the same kind of recom- 
pense which the rewards of the unprincipled were here — 
comfort, abundance, physical enjoyment — or else all is wrong. 

But if you look into it, the balance is perfectly adjusted 
even here. God has made his world much better than you 
and I could make it. Every thing reaps its own harvest, ev- 
ery act has its own reward. And before you covet the en- 
joyment which another possesses, you must first calculate the 
cost at which it was procured. 

For instance, the religious tradesman complains that his 
honesty is a hindrance to his success : that the tide of cus- 
tom pours into the doors of his less scrupulous neighbors in 
the same street, while he himself waits for hours idle. My 
brother, do you think that God is going to reward honor, in- 
tegrity, high-mindedness, with this world's coin ? Do you 
fancy that He will pay spiritual excellence with plenty of 
custom? Xow, consider the price that man has paid for his 
success. Perhaps mental degradation and inward dishonor. 
His advertisements are all deceptive; his treatment of his 
workmen tyrannical ; his cheap prices made possible by in- 
ferior articles. Sow that man's seed, and you will reap that 
man's harvest. Cheat, lie, advertise, be unscrupulous in your 
assertions, custom will come to you. But if the price is too 
dear, let him have his harvest, and take yours; yours is 
a clear conscience, a pure mind, rectitude within and with- 
out. Will you part Avith that for his ? Then why do you 
complain? He has paid his price, you do not choose to 
pay it.^ 

Again, it is not an uncommon thing to see a man rise from 
insignificance to sudden wealth by speculation. Within the 
last ten or twenty years England has gazed on many such a 
phenomenon. In this case, as in spiritual things, the law seems 
to hold : He that hath, to him shall be given. Tens of thou- 



1 62 The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest 

sands soon increase and multiply to hundreds of thousands 
His doors are besieged by the rich and great. Royalty ban- 
quets at his table, and nobles court his alliance. Whereupon 
some simple Christian is inclined to complain : " How strange 
that so much prosperity should be the lot of mere clever- 
ness !" 

Well, are these really God's chief blessings ? Is it for such 
as these you serve Him ? And would these indeed satisfy 
your soul ? Would you have God reward his saintliest with 
these gauds and gewgaws — all this trash — rank, and wealth, 
and equipages, and plate, and courtship from the needy 
great ? Call you that the heaven of the holy ? Compute 
now what was paid for that? The price that merchant- 
prince paid, perhaps with the blood of his own soul, was 
shame and guilt. The price he is paying now is perpetual 
dread of detection ; or worse still, the hardness which can 
laugh at detection ; or one deep lower yet, the low and grov- 
elling soul which can be satisfied with these things as a 
paradise, and ask no higher. He has reaped enjoyment — 
yes, and he has sown, too, the seed of infamy. 

It is all fair. Count the cost. "He that saveth his life 
shall lose it." Save your life if you like, but do not complain 
if you lose your nobler life — yourself: win the whole world, 
but remember you do it by losing your own soul. Every sin 
must be paid for ; every sensual indulgence is a harvest, the 
price for which is so much ruin for the soul. " God is not 
mockedy 

Once more, religious men in every profession are surprised 
to find that many of its avenues are closed to them. The 
conscientious churchman complains that his delicate scruples 
or his bold truthfulness stand in the way of his preferment ; 
while another man, who conquers his scruples or softens the 
eye of truth, i-ises, and sits down a mitred peer in Parliament. 
The honorable lawyer feels that his practice is limited, while 
the unprincipled practitioner receives all he loses : and the 
Christian physician feels sore and sad at perceiving that char- 
latanism succeeds in winning employment ; or, if not char- 
latanism, at least that affability and courtly manners take the 
place that is due to superior knowledge. 

Let such men take comfort, and judge fairly. Popularity 
is one of the things of an earthly harvest for which quite 
earthly qualifications are required. I say not always dishon- 
orable qualifications, but a certain flexibility of disposition ; 
a certain courtly willingness to sink obnoxious truths, and 
adapt ourselves to the prejudices of the minds of others ; a 
certaih adroitness at catchins: the tone of those with whom 



The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest. 1 63 

we are. Without some of these things no man can be popu 
lar in any profession. 

But you have resolved to be a liver — a doer — a champion 
of the truth. Your ambition is to be pure in the last re- 
cesses of the mind. You have your reward : a soul upright 
and manly — a fearless bearing, that dreads to look no man in 
the face — a willingness to let men search you through and 
through, and defy them to see any difference between what 
you seem and what you are. Now, your price : your price is 
dislike. The price of being true is the Cross. The warrior 
of the truth must not expect success. What have you to do 
with popularity ? Sow for it, and you will have it. But if 
you wish for it, or wish for peace, you have mistaken your 
calling ; you must not be a teacher of the truth ; you must 
not cut prejudice against the grain : you must leave medical, 
legal, theological truth, to harder and nobler men, who are 
willing to take the martyr's cross, and win the martyr's 
crown. 

This is the mistake men make. They expect both har- 
vests, paying only one price. They would be blessed with 
goodness and prosperity at once. They would have that on 
which they bestowed no labor. They take sinful pleasure, 
and think it very hard that they must pay for it in agony, 
and worse than agony, souls deteriorated. They would 
monopolize heaven in their souls, and the world's prizes at 
the same time. This is to expect to come back, like Joseph's 
brethren from the land of plenty, with the corn in their sacks, 
and the money returned, too, in their sacks' mouths. No, no ; 
it will not do. " Be not deceived ; God is not mocked." 
Reap loliat you have sown. If you sow the wind, do not 
complain if your harvest is the whirlwind. If you sow to the 
Spirit, be content with a spiritual reward : invisible — within : 
" more life and higher life." 

n. Next, the two branches of the application of this 
principle. 

First : He that soweth to the flesh, shall of the flesh reap 
corruption. There are two kinds of life : one of the flesh, 
another of the spirit. Amidst the animal and selfish desires 
of our nature there is a voice which clearly speaks of duty, 
right, perfection. This is the Spirit of Deity in man ; it is 
the life of God in the soul. This is the evidence of our 
divine parentage. 

But there is a double temptation to live the other life 
instead of this. First, the desires of our animal nature are 
keener than those of our spiritual. The cry of Passion is 



1 64 The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest. 

louder than the calm voice of Duty. Next, the reward in 
the case of our sensitive nature is given sooner. It takes 
less time to amass a fortune than to become heavenly- 
minded. It costs less to indulge an appetite than it doea 
to gain the peace of lulled passion. And hence, when men 
feel that for the spiritual blessing, the bread must be cast 
upon the waters which shall not be found until after many 
days (skepticism whispers " never !"), it is quite intelligible 
why they choose the visible and palpable, instead of the 
invisible advantage, and plan for an immediate harvest 
rather than a distant one. 

The other life is that of the flesh. The " flesh " includes 
all the desires of our unrenewed nature — the harmless aa 
well as sinful. Any labor, therefore, w^hich is bounded by 
present well-being is soicing to the flesh — whether it be the 
gratification of an immediate impulse, or the long-contrived 
plan reaching forward over many years. Sowing to the 
flesh includes, therefore, 

1. Those who live, in open riot. He sows to the flesh 
who pampers its unduly animal appetites. Do not think 
that I speak contemptuously of our animal nature, as if it 
were not human and sacred. The lowest feelings of our 
nature become sublime by being made the instruments of 
our nobler emotions. Love, self-command, wdll elevate them 
all ; and to ennoble and purify, not to crush them, is the 
long, slow work of Christian life. Christ, says St. Paul, is 
the Saviour of the body. But if, instead of subduing these 
to the life of the Spirit, a man gives to them the rein and 
even the spur, the result is not difficult to foresee. There 
are men who do this. They " make provision for the flesh, 
to fulfill the lusts thereof" They whet the appetites by 
indulgence. They whip the jaded senses to their work. 
Whatever the constitutional bias may be, anger, intemper- 
ance, epicurism, indolence, desires, there are societies, con- 
versations, scenes, which supply fuel for the flame, as well 
as opposite ones which cut ofl" the nutriment. To indulge 
in these, knowing the result, is to foster the desire which 
brings forth the sin which ends in death. This is "sowing 
to the flesh." 

If there be one to whom these words which I have used, 
veiled in the proprieties due to delicate reserve, are not 
without meaning, from this sentence of God's word let him 
learn his doom. He is looking forward to a liarvest wherein 
he may reap the fruit of his present anticipations. And he 
shall reap it. He shall liave his indulgence, he shall enjoy 
his guilty rapture, he shall ha^'e his unhallowed triumph,* 



The Principle of tJie Spiiatual Harvest. 1 65 

and the boon companions of his pleasures shall award him 
the meed of their applause. He has sown the seed, and ip 
fair requital he shall have his harvest. It is all fair. He 
shall enjoy. But tarry a while : the law hath yet another 
hold upon him. This deep law of the whole universe goes 
farther. He has sown to the flesh, and of the flesh he has 
reaped pleasure; he has sown to the flesh, and of the flesh 
he shall reap corruption. That is, in his case, the ruin of 
the soul. It is an awful thing to see a soul in ruins: like a 
temple which once was fair and noble, but now lies over- 
thrown, matted with ivy, weeds, and tangled briers, among 
which things noisome crawl and live. He shall reap the 
harvest of disappointment — the harvest of bitter, useless 
remorse. The crime of sense is avenged by sense, which 
wears by time. He shall have the worm that gnaws, and 
the fire that is not quenched. He shall reap the fruit of 
long-indulged desires, which have become tyrannous at last, 
and constitute him his own tormentor. His harvest is a 
soul in flames, and the tongue that no drop can cool. Pas- 
sions that burn, and appetites that crave, when the power 
of enjoyment is gone. He has sowed to the flesh. " God is 
not mocked." The man reaps. 

2. There is a less gross way of sowing to the flesh. There 
are men of sagacity and judgment in the aflairs of this life 
whose penetration is almost intuitive in all things where the 
step in question involves success or failure here. They are 
those who are called in the parable the children of this 
world, wise in their generation. They moralize and specu- 
late about eternity, but do not plan for it. There is no seed 
sown for an invisible harvest. If they think they have 
sown for such a harvest, they might test themselves by the 
question, What would they lose if there were to be no eter- 
nity ? For the children of God, so far as earth is concerned, 
" If in this life only they have hope in Christ, then are they 
of all men most miserable." But they — these sagacious, 
prudent men of this world — they haA^e their reward. What 
have they ventured, given up, sacrificed, which is all lost 
forever, if this world be all ? What have they buried like 
seed in the ground, lost forever, if there be no eternity ? 

Xow we do not say these men are absolutely wicked. 
We distinguish between their sowing to the flesh, and the 
sowing of those profligates last spoken of All we say is, 
there is " corruption " written on their harvest. It was for 
earth, and with earth it perishes. It may be the labor of 
the statesman, planning, like the Roman of old, the govern- 
ment and order of the kingdoms of the earth ; or that of the 



1 66 The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest. 

astronomer, weighing suns, prescribing rules of return to 
comets, and dealing with things above earth in space, but 
unspiritual still ; or that of the son of a humbler laborious* 
ness, whose work is merely to provide for a family: or, 
lastly, the narrower range of the man of pleasure, whose 
chief care is where he shall spend the next season, in what 
metropolis, or which watering-place, or how best enjoy the 
next entertainment. 

All these are objects more or less harmless. But they 
end. The pyramid crumbles into dust at last. The mighty 
empire of the eternal city breaks into fragments which dis- 
appear. The sowers for earth have their harvest here : Suc- 
cess in their schemes — quiet intellectual enjoyment — exemp' 
tion from pain and loss — the fruits of worldly-wise sagacity. 
And that is all. " When the breath goeth forth, they return 
to their dust, and all their thoughts perish." The grave is 
not to them the gate of paradise, but simply the impressive 
mockery which the hand of death writes upon that body for 
which they lived, and with which all is gone. They reap 
corruption, for all they have toiled for decays ! 

Ye that lead the life of respectable worldliness, let these 
considerations arrest your indifference to the Gospel. You 
have sown for earth. Well. And then — what? Hear the 
Gospel, which tells of a Saviour whose sacrifice is the world's 
life — whose death is the law of life; from whose resurrection 
streams a Spirit which can change carnal into spiritual men — • 
whose whole existence, reflecting God, was the utterance of 
the Divine truth and rule of heavenly life, the blessedness of 
giving. To live so, and to believe so, is to sow to the Spirit. 

Lastly, sowing to the Spirit. " He that soweth to the 
Spirit, shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." 

What is meant by sowing to the Spirit here is plain. " Let 
us not be weary in well-doing," says the apostle directly after: 
" for in due season we shall reap if we faint not." Well-do- 
ing : not faith, but works of goodness, were the sowing that 
he spoke of 

There is proclaimed here the rewardableness of works. So 
in many other passages : " Abounding in the work of the Lord, 
forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the 
Lord." " Laying up a good foundation for the time to come,' 
was the reason alleged for charging rich men to be willing to 
give ; and so all through. There is an irreversible principle. 
The amount of harvest is proportioned to the seed sow^n ex- 
actly. There are degrees of glory. The man who gives out 
of his abundance has one blessing. She who gives the mite, 
all she had. even all her living, has another, quite different. 



The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest. 167 

The rectitude of this principle, and what it is, will be plainer 
from the following considerations : 

1. The harvest is life eternal. But eternal life here does 
not simply mean a life that lasts forever^ That is the destiny 
of the soul — all souls, bad as well as good. But the bad do 
not enter into this " eternal life." It is not simply the dura- 
tion, but the quality of the life which constitutes its charac- 
ter of eternal A spirit may live forever, yet not enter into 
this. And a man may live but for five minutes the life of 
Divine benevolence, or desire for perfectness : in those five 
minutes he has entered into the life which is eternal — never 
fluctuates, but is the same unalterably, forever in the life of 
God. This is the reward. 

2. The reward is not arbitrary, but natural. God's re- 
wards and God's punishments are all natural. Distinguish 
between arbitrary and natural. Death is an arbitrary pun- 
ishment for forgery : it might be changed for transportation. 
It is not naturally connected. It depends upon the will of 
the law-maker. But trembling nerves are the direct and nat- 
ural results of intemperance. They are, in the order of na- 
ture, the results of wrong-doing. The man reaps lohat he has 
sown. Similarly in rewards. If God gave riches in return 
for humbleness, that would be an arbitrary connection. He 
did give such a reward to Solomon. But when He gives life 
eternal, meaning by life eternal not duration of existence but 
heavenly quality of existence, as explained already, it is all 
natural. The seed sown in the ground contains in itself the 
future harvest. The harvest is but the development of the 
germ of life in the seed. A holy act strengthens the inward 
holiness. It is a seed of life growing into more life. "What- 
soever a man soweth, that shall he reap." He that sows 
much, thereby becomes more conformed to God than he was 
before — in heart and spirit. That is his reward and harvest. 
And just as among the apostles there was one wliose spirit, 
attuned to love, made him emphatically the disciple whom 
Jesus loved, so shall there be some who, by previous disci- 
pline of the Holy Ghost, shall have more of His mind, and 
understand more of His love, and drink deeper of His joy 
than others — they that have sowed bountifully. 

Every act done in Christ receives its exact and appropriate 
reward. They that are meek shall inherit the earth. They 
that are pure shall see God. They that suffer shall reign 
with Him. They that turn many to righteousness shall shine 
as the stars forever. They that receive a righteous man in 
the name of a righteous man — that is, because he is a right- 
eous man — shall receive a righteous man's reward. Even the 



1 68 The Loneliness of Christ 

cup of cold water, given in the name of Christ, shall not lose 
its leward. 

It will be therefore seen at once, reward is not the result 
of merit. It is, in the order of grace, the natural consequence 
of well-doing. It is life becoming more life. It is the soul 
developing itself It is the Holy Spirit of God in man making 
itself more felt, and mingling more and more with his soul, 
felt more consciously with an ever-increasing heaven. You 
reap what you sow — not something else, but that. An act 
of love makes the soul more loving. A deed of humbleness 
deepens humbleness. The thing reaped is the very thing 
sown, multiplied a hundred-fold. You have sown a seed of 
life, you reap life everlasting. 



XV. 
THE LONELINESS OF CHRIST. 

"Jesus answered them, Do ye now believe? Behold, the hour cometh, 
yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall 
leave me alone : and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me." — 
John xvi. 31, 32. 

There are two kinds of solitude : the first consisting of 
insulation in space, the other of isolation of the spirit. The 
first is simply separation by distance. When we are seen, 
touched, heard by none, we are said to be alone. And all 
hearts respond to the truth of that saying. This is not soli- 
tude; for sympathy can people our solitude with a crowd. 
The fisherman on the ocean alone at night is not alone when 
he remembers the earnest longings which are arising up to 
heaven at home for his safety ; the traveller is not alone when 
the faces which will greet him on his arrival seem to beam 
upon him as he trudges on ; the solitary student is not alone 
when he feels that human hearts will respond to the truths 
which he is preparing to address to them. 

The other is loneliness of soul. There are times when 
hands touch ours, but only send an icy chill of unsympa- 
thizing indifference to the heart : when eyes gaze into ours, 
but with a glazed look which can not read into the bottom 
of our souls — when words pass from our lips, but only come 
back as an echo reverberated without replying through a 
dreary solitude — when the multitude throng and press us, and 
we can not say, as Christ said, "Somebody luith touched \\\^.^ 



The Loneliness of Christ, 169 

for the contact has been not between soul and soul, but only 
between form and form. 

And there are two kinds of men who feel this last solitude 
in different ways. The first are the men of self-reliance: 
self-dependent — who ask no counsel, and crave no sympathy 
— who act and resolve alone — who can go sternly through 
duty, and scarcely shrink, let what will be crushed in them. 
Such men command respect ; for whoever respects himself 
constrains the reverence of others. They are invaluable in 
all those professions of life in which sensitive feeling would 
be a superfluity ; they make iron commanders ; surgeons 
w^ho do not shrink ; and statesmen who do not flinch from 
their purpose for the dread of unpopularity. But mere self- 
dependence is weakness, and the conflict is terrible when a 
human sense of weakness is felt by such men. 

Jacob was alone when he slept in his waj?" to Padan-aram, 
the first night that he was away from his father's roof, with 
the world before him, and all the old associations broken up, 
and Elijah was alone in the wilderness when the court had 
deserted him, and he said, " They have digged down Thine 
altars, and slain Thy prophets with the sword : and I, even 
I, only am left, and they seek my life to take it away." 
But the loneliness of the tender Jacob was very different 
from that of the stern Elijah. To Jacob the sympathy he 
yearned for was realized in the form of a simple dream. A 
ladder raised from earth to heaven figured the possibility of 
communion between the spirit of man and the Spirit of God. 
In Elijah's case, the storm, and the earthquake, and the fire 
did their convulsing work in the soul, before a still, small 
voice told him that he was not alone. In such a spirit the 
sense of weakness comes with a burst of agony, and the 
dreadful conviction of being alone manifests itself with a 
rending of the heart of rock. It is only so that such souls 
can be taught that, the Father is with them, and that they 
are not alone. 

There is another class of men who live in sympathy. 
These are affectionate minds which tremble at the thought 
of being alone : not from want of courage, nor from weak- 
ness of intellect comes their dependence upon others, but 
from the intensity of thCiT affections. It is the trembling 
spirit of humanity in them. They want not aid, nor even 
countenance, but only sympathy. And the trial comes to 
them not in the shape of fierce struggle, but of chill and ut- 
ter loneliness, when they are called upon to perform a duty 
on which the world looks coldly, or to embrace a truth whicn 
has not found lodgment yet in the bi;easts of othera. 



1 70 The Loneliness of Christ. 

It is to this latter and not to the former class that we 
must look if we would understand the spirit in which the 
words of the text were pronounced. The deep humanity of 
the soul of Christ was gifted with those finer sensibilities of 
affectionate nature which stand in need of sympathy. He 
not only gave sympathy, but wanted it too, from others. 
He who selected the gentle John to be his friend — who found 
solace in female sympathy, attended by the women who 
ministered to him out of their substance — who in the trial- 
hour could not bear even to pray without the human pres- 
ence — whicli is the pledge and reminder of God's presence — • 
had nothing in Him of the hard, merely self-dependent 
character. Even this verse testifies to the same fact. A 
stern spirit never could have said, " I am not alone ; the Fa- 
ther is with Me ;" never would have felt the loneliness w^hich 
needed the balancing truth. These words tell of a struggle 
— an inward reasoning — a difficulty and a i-eply — a sense of 
solitude — " I shall be alone ;" and an immediate correction 
of that, "not alone — the Father is with Me." 

There is no thought connected with the life of Christ more 
touching, none that seems so peculiarly to characterize His 
spirit, than the solitariness in which He lived. Those w^ho 
understood Him best only half understood Him. Those 
who knew Him best scarcely could be said to know Him. 
On this occasion the disciples thought — Now we do under- 
stand — now we believe. The lonely spirit answered, " Do 
ye now believe? Behold, the hour cometh that ye shall be 
scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave Me alone." 

Yery impressive is that trait in His history. He was in 
this world alone. 

I. First, then, we meditate on the loneliness of Christ. 
n. On the temper of His solitude. 

1. The loneliness of Christ was caused by the Divine ele 
vation of His character. His infinite superiority severed 
Him from sympathy; His exquisite affectionateness made 
that want of sympathy a keen trial. 

There is a second-rate greatness which the world can com- 
prehend. If we take two who are brouglit into direct con- 
trast by Christ Himself, the one the type of human, the oth- 
er that of Divine excellence, the Son of Man and John the 
Baptist, this becomes clearly manifest. John's life had a 
certain rude, rugged goodness, on which was written, in 
characters which required no magnifying-glass to read, spir- 
itual excellence. The world, on the whole, accepted him. 
Pharisees and Sadducees went to his baptism. The people 



The Loneliness of Christ, 1 7 1 

idolized him as a prophet ; and if he had not chanced to 
cross the path of a weak prince and a revengeful woman, we 
can see no reason why John might not have finished his 
course with joy, recognized as irreproachable. If we in- 
quire why it was that the world accepted John and rejected 
Christ, one reply appears to be that the life of the one was 
finitely simple and one-sided, that of the otlier divinely com- 
plex. 

In physical nature, the naturalist finds no difficulty in com- 
prehending the simple structure of the lowest organizations 
of animal life, where one uniform texture and one organ per- 
forming the office of brain and heart and lungs, at once leave 
little to perplex. But when he comes to study the complex 
anatomy of man, he has the labor of a lifetime before him. 
It is not difficult to master the constitution of a single coun- 
try ; but when you try to understand the universe, you find 
infinite appearances of contradiction : law opposed by law — 
motion balanced by motion — happiness blended with misery : 
and the power to elicit a divine order and unity out of this 
complex variety is given to only a few of the gifted of the 
race. That which the structure of man is to the structure 
of the limpet — that which the universe is to a single coun- 
try — the complex and boundless soul of Christ was to the 
souls of other men. 

Therefore, to the superficial observer, His life was a mass 
of inconsistencies and contradictions. All thought them- 
selves qualified to point out the discrepancies. The Phari- 
sees could not comprehend how a holy teacher could eat with 
publicans and sinners. His own brethren could not recon- 
cile His assumption of a public office with the privacy which 
He aimed at keeping. " If thou doest these things, show 
thyself to the world." Some thought He was "a good 
man," others said, "Nay, but He deceiveth the people." 
And hence it was that He lived to see all that acceptance 
which had marked the earlier stage of His career, as for in- 
stance at Capernaum, melt away. First the Pharisees took 
the alarm ; then the Sadducees ; then the political party of 
the Herodians ; then the people. That was the most terrible 
of all: for the enmity of the upper classes is impotent; but 
when that cry of brute force is stirred from the deeps of so- 
ciety, as deaf to the voice of reason as the ocean in its 
strength churned into raving foam by the winds, the heart 
of mere earthly oak quails before that. The apostles, at all 
events, did quail. One denied, another betrayed, all desert- 
ed. They " were scattered, each to his own :" and the Truth 
Himself was left alone in Pilate's judgment-hall. 



172 The Loneliness of Christ 

Now learn from this a very important distinction. To 
feel solitary is no uncommon thing. To complain of being 
alone, without sympathy and misunderstood, is general 
enough. In every place, in many a family, these victims of 
diseased sensibility are to be found, and they might find a 
weakening satisfaction in observing a parallel between their 
own feelings and those of Jesus. But before that parallel is 
assumed, be very sure that it is, as in His case, the elevation 
of your character which severs you from your species. The 
world has small sympathy for Divine goodness ; but it also 
has little for a great many other qualities which are disagree- 
able to it. You meet with no response — you are passed by 
— find yourself unpopular — meet with little communion. 
Well ; is that because you are above the world, nobler, de- 
vising and executing grand plans which they can not com- 
prehend — vindicating the wronged, proclaiming and living 
on great principles — offending it by the saintliness of your 
purity, and the unworldliness of your aspirations? Then 
yours is the loneliness of Christ. Or is it that you are 
wrapped up in self— cold, disobliging, sentimental, indifferent 
about the welfare of others, and very much astonished that 
they are not deeply interested in you ? You must not use 
these words of Christ. They have nothing to do with you. 

Let us look at one or two of the occasions on which this 
loneliness was felt. 

The first time was when He was but twelve years old, 
when His parents found Him in the temple, hearing the 
doctors and asking them questions. High thoughts were in 
the child's soul : expanding views of life ; larger views of 
duty and His own destiny. 

There is a moment in every true life — to some it comes 
very early — when the old routine of duty is not large enough 
— when the parental roof seems too low, because the Infinite 
above is arching over the soul — when the old formulas in 
creeds, catechisms, and articles seem to be narrow, and they 
must either be thrown aside, or else transformed into living 
and breathing realities — when the earthly father's authority 
is being superseded by the claims of a Father in heaven. 

That is a lonely, lonely moment, when the young soul first 
feels God ; when this earth is recognized as an " awful place, 
yea, the very gate of heaven ;" when the dream-ladder is 
seen planted against the skies, and we wake, and the dream 
haunts us as a sublime reality. 

You may detect the approach of that moment in the 
young man or the young woman b}^ the awakened spirit of 
mquiry : by a certain restlessness of look, and an eager eai> 



The Lone Lines s oj CftrisL i "]2^ 

nestness of tone — by the devouring study of all kinds of books 
— by the waning of your own influence, w^hile the inquirer 
is asking the truth of the doctors and teachers in the vast 
temple of the world — by a certain opinionativeness, which is 
austere and disagreeable enough ; but the austerest moment 
of the fruit's taste is that in which it is passing from green- 
ness into ripeness. If you wait in patience, the sour will 
become sweet. Rightly looked at, that opinionativeness is 
more truly anguish : the fearful solitude of feeling the inse- 
curity of all that is human ; the discovery that life is real, 
and many forms of social and religious existence hollow. 
The old moorings are torn away, and the soul is drifting, 
drifting, drifting, very often without compass, except the 
guidance of an unseen hand, into the vast infinite of God. 
Then come the lonely words, and no wonder, "How is it 
that ye sought me ? Wist ye not that I must be about my 
Father's business ?" 

2. That solitude was felt by Christ in trial. In the des- 
ert, in Pilate's judgment-hall, in the garden, He was alone — 
and alone must every son of man meet his trial-hour. The 
individuality of the soul necessitates that. Each man is a 
new soul in this world ; untried, wath a boundless possible 
before him. No one can predict what he may become, pre- 
scribe his duties, or mark out his obligations. Each man's 
own nature has its own peculiar rules ; and he must take up 
his life-plan alone, and persevere in it in a perfect privacy 
with which no stranger intermeddleth. Each man's tempta- 
tions are made up of a host of peculiarities, internal and ex- 
ternal, which no other mind can measure. You are tried 
alone — alone you pass into the desert — alone you must bear 
and conquer in the agony — alone you must be sifted by the 
world. There are moments known only to a man's own self, 
when he sits by the poisoned springs of existence " yearning 
for a morrow which shall free him from the strife." And 
there are trials more terrible than that. Not w^hen vicious 
inclinations are opposed to holy, but when virtue conflicts 
with virtue, is the real rending of the soul in twain. A 
temptation in which the lower nature struggles for mastery 
can be met by the whole united force of the spirit. But it 
is when obedience to a heavenly Father can be only paid by 
disobedience to an earthly one ; or fidelity to duty can be 
only kept by infidelity to some entangling engagement ; or 
the straight path must be taken over the misery of others ; 
or the counsel of the affectionate friend must be met with a 
" Get thee behind me, Satan," oh, it is then, when human ad- 
vice is unavailable, that the soul feels what it is to be alone. 



1 74 The Loneliness of Christ. 

Once more — the Redeemer's soul was alone in dying 
The hour had come — they were all gone, and He was, as He 
predicted, left alone. All that is human drops from us in 
that hour. Human faces flit and fade, and the sounds of 
the world become confused. " I shall die alone " — yes, and 
alone you live. The philosopher tells us that no atom in 
creation touches another atom — they only approach within a 
certain distance ; then the attraction ceases, and an invisible 
something repels — they only seem to touch. No soul touches 
another soul except at one or two points ; and those chiefly 
external — a fearful and a lonely thought, but one of the 
truest of life. Death only realizes that which has been the fact 
all along. In the central deej)s of our being we are alone. 

n. The spirit or temper of that solitude. 

1. Observe its grandeur. I am alone, yet not alone. 
There is a feeble and sentimental way in which we speak of 
the Man of Sorrows. We turn to the cross, and the agony, 
and the loneliness, to touch the softer feelings, to arouse 
compassion. You degrade that loneliness by your compas- 
sion. Compassion ! compassion for Him ! Adore if you 
will — respect and reverence that sublime solitariness with 
which none but the Father was — ^but no pity ; let it draw 
out the firmer and manlier graces of the soul. Even tender 
sympathy seems out of place. 

For even in human things, the strength that is in a man 
can be only learnt when he is thrown upon his own resources 
and left alone. What a man can do in conjunction with oth- 
ers does not test the man. Tell us what he can do alone. 
It is one thing to defend the truth when you know that your 
audience are already prepossessed, and that every argument 
will meet a willing response ; and it is another tiling to hold 
the truth when truth must be supported, if at all, alone — met 
by cold looks and unsympathizing suspicion. It is one thing 
to rush on to danger with the shouts and the sympathy of 
numbers ; it is another thing when the lonely chieftain of 
the sinking ship sees the last boatful disengage itself, and 
folds his arms to go down into the majesty of darkness, 
crushed, but not subdued. 

Such and greater far was the strength and majesty of the 
Saviour's solitariness. It was not the trial of the lonely her- 
mit. There is a certain gentle and pleasing melancholy in 
the life which is lived alone. But there are the forms of na- 
ture to speak to him, and he has not the positive opposition 
of mankind if he has the absence of actual sympathy. It is 
a solemn thing, doubtless, to be apart from men, and to feel 



The Loneliness of Christ 175 

eternity rushing by like an arrowy river. But the solitude 
of Christ was the solitude of a crowd. In that single human 
bosom dwelt the thought which was to be the germ of the 
world's life : a thought unshared, misunderstood, or rejected. 
Can you not feel the grandeur of those words, when the Man 
reposing on His solitary strength, felt the last shadow of per- 
fect isolation pass across His soul : " My God, my God, why 
hast Thou forsaken me ?" 

Next, learn from these words self-reliance. " Ye shall 
leave me alone." Alone, then, the Son of man was content 
to be. He threw Himself on His own solitary thought ; did 
not go down to meet the world, but waited, though it might 
be for ages, till the world should come round to Him. He 
appealed to the future ; did not aim at seeming consistent ; 
left His contradictions unexplained ; " I came from the Fa- 
ther, I leave the world, and go to the Father." " Now," 
said they, "thou speakest no proverb" — that is, enigma. 
But many a hard and enigmatical saying before He had 
spoken, and He left them all. A thread runs through all 
true acts, stringing them together into one harmonious 
chain ; but it is not for the Son of God to be anxious to 
prove their consistency with each other. 

This is self-reliance — to repose calmly on the thought 
which is deepest in our bosoms, and be unmoved if the 
world will not accept it yet. To live on your own convic- 
tions against the world is to overcome the world ; to believe 
that what is truest in you is true for all ; to abide by that, 
and not be over-anxious to be heard or understood, or sym- 
pathized with, certain that at last all must acknowledge the 
same, and that while you stand firm, the world will come 
round to you, that is independence. It is not difficult to get 
away into retirement, and there live upon your own convic- 
tions ; nor is it difficult to mix with men, and follow their 
convictions ; but to enter into the world, and there live out 
firmly and fearlessly according to your own conscience, that 
is Christian greatness. 

There is a cowardice in this age which is not Christian. 
We shrink from the consequences of truth. We look round 
and cling dependently. We ask what men will think — what 
others will say — whether they will not stare in astonishment. 
Perhaps they will ; but he who is calculating that, will ac- 
complish nothing in this life. The Father — the Father who 
is with us and in us — what does He think ? God's work can 
not be done without a spirit of independence. A man is got 
some way in the Christian life when he has learned to say 
humbly and yet majestically, " I dare to be alone," 



1 76 The Loneliness of Christ, 

Lastly, remark the humility of this loneliness. Had the 
Son of man simply said, I can be alone. He would have said 
no more than any proud, self-relying man can say. But 
when he added, " because the Father is with me," that inde- 
pendence assumed another character, and self-reliance be- 
came only another form of reliance upon God. Distinguish 
between genuine and spurious humility. There is a false 
humility which says, " It is my own poor thought, and I 
must not trust it. 1 must distrust my own reason and judg- 
ment, because they are my own. I must not accept the dic- 
tates of my own conscience, for it is not my own, and is not 
trust in self the great fault of our fallen nature ?" 

Very well. Now remember something else. There is a 
Spirit which beareth witness with our spirits ; there is a God 
who " is not far from any one of us ;" there is a " Light 
which lighteth every man which cometh into the world." Do 
not be unnaturally humble. The thought of your mind, per- 
chance, is the thought of God. To refuse to follow that may 
be to disown God. To take the judgment and conscience of 
other men to live b}^, where is the humility of that ? From 
whence did their conscience and judgment come? Was the 
fountain from which they drew exhausted for you ? If they 
refuse like you to rely on their own conscience, and you rely 
upon it, how are you sure that it is more the mind of God 
than your own which you have refused to hear ? 

Look at it in another way. The charm of the words of 
great men — those grand sayings which are recognized as true 
as soon as heard — is this, that you recognize them as wisdom 
which has passed across your own mind. You feel that they 
are your own thoughts come back to you, else you would 
not at once admit them: " All that floated across me before, 
only I could not say it, and did not feel confident enough to 
assert it, or had not conviction enough to put it into words." 
Yes, God spoke to you what He did to them : only they be- 
lieved it, said it, trusted the Word within them, and you did 
not. Be sure that often when you say, " It is only my own 
poor thought, and I am alone," the real correcting thought is 
this, " Alone, but the Father is with me ;" therefore I can 
live that lonely conviction. 

There is no danger in this, whatever timid minds may 
think — no danger of mistake, if the character be a true one. 
For we are not left in uncertainty in this matter. It is given 
us to know our base from our noble hours — to distinguish 
between the voice which is from above, and that which 
speaks from below, out of the abyss of our animal and selfish 
nature. Samuel could distinguish between the impulse, 



The New Commandment^ Etc. 177 

qnite a human one, which would have made him select Eliab 
out of Jesse's sons, and the deeper judgment by which "the 
Lord said, Look not on his countenance, nor on the height 
of his stature, for I have refused him." Doubtless deep 
truth of character is required for this ; for the whispering 
voices get mixed together, and we dare not abide by our 
own thoughts, because we think them our own, and not 
God's ; and this because we only now and then endeavor to 
know in earnest. It is only given to the habitually true to 
know the difference. He knew it, because all His blessed 
life long He could say, "My judgment is just, because I seek 
not my own will, but the will of Him which sent me." 

The practical result and inference of all this is a very sim- 
ple, but a very deep one — the deepest of existence. Let life 
be a life of faith. Do not go timorously about, inquiring 
what others think, what others believe, and what others say. 
It seems the easiest, it is the most difficult thing in life, to do 
this — believe in God. God is near you. Throw yourself 
fearlessly upon Him. Trembling mortal, there is an unknown 
might within your soul which will wake when you command 
it. The day may come when all that is human, man and 
woman, will fall off from you, as they did from Him. Let 
His strength be yours. Be independent of them all now. 
The Father is with you. Look to Him, and He will save you. 



XVI. 

THE NEW COMMANDMENT OF LOYE TO ONE 
ANOTHER. 

"A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another ; as I 
have loved you, that ye also love one another." — John xiii. 34. 

These words derive impressiveness from having been spok- 
en immediately before the last Supper, and on the eve of 
the great Sacrifice : the commandment of love issued appro- 
priately at the time of the Feast of Love, and not long before 
the great Act of Love. For the love of Christ was no fine 
saying: it cost Him His life to say these words with mean- 
ing, "As I have loved you." 

There is a difficulty in the attempt to grasp the meaning 
of this command, arising from the fact that words change 
their meaning. Our Lord affixed a new significance to the 
word love : it had been in use, of course, before, but the new 
sense in which He used it made it a new word. 



1 78 The New Commandment of 

His law is not adequately represented by the word love, 
because love is, by conventional usage, appropriated to one 
species of human affection, which, in the commoner men, is 
the most selfish of all our feelings; and in the best is too ex- 
clusive and individual to represent that charity which is uni- 
versal. 

Nor is charity a perfect symbol of His meaning ; for chari- 
ty, by use, is identified with another form of love which is but 
a portion of it, almsgiving ; and too saturated with that 
meaning to be entirely disengaged from it, even when we 
use it most accurately. 

Benevolence or philanthropy, in derivation, come nearer to 
the idea ; but yet you feel at once that these words fall 
short ; they are too tame and cold ; too merely passive, as 
states of feeling rather than forms of life. 

We have no sufficient word. There is therefore no help 
for it, but patiently to strive to master the meaning of this 
mighty word love, in the only light that is left us — the light 
of the Saviour's life : "As I have loved you :" that alone ex- 
pounds it. We will dispossess our minds of all preconceived 
notions ; remove all low associations, all partial and conven- 
tional ones. If we would understand this law, it must be 
ever a " new " commandment, ever receiving fresh light and 
meaning from His life. 

Take, I. The novelty of the law — " That ye love one an- 
other." 

H. The spirit or measure of it — " As I have loved you." 

L Its novelty. A "new commandment," yet that law 
was old. See 1 John ii. 7, 8. It was new as an historical fact. 
We talk of the apostolic mission as a matter of course ; we 
say that the apostles were ordered to go and plant churches, 
and so we dismiss the great fact. But we forget that the 
command was rather the result of a spirit working from with- 
in, than of an injunction working from without. That spirit 
was love. 

And when that new spirit was in the world, see how 
straightway it created a new thing. Men before that had 
travelled into foreign countries : the naturalist to collect 
specimens; the historian to accumulate facts; the philoso- 
pher to hive up wisdom, or else he had staid in his cell or 
grove to paint beautiful pictures of love. But the spectacle 
of an Apostle Paul crossing oceans — not to conquer kingdoms 
— not to hive up knowledge, but to impart life — not to accu- 
mulate stores for self, but to give, and to spend himself— 
was new in the history of the world. The celestial fire had 



Love to one Another. 1 79 

i;ouehed the hearts of men, and their hearts flamed ; and it 
caught, and spread, and would not stop. On they went, that 
glorious band of brothers, in their strange enterprise, over 
oceans, and through forests, penetrating into the dungeon, 
and to the throne — to the hut of the savage feeding on hu- 
man flesh, and to the shore lined with the skin-clad inhabit- 
ants of these far isles of Britain. Read the account given 
by Tertullian of the marvellous rapidity with which theJ 
Christians increased, and you are reminded of one of those 
vast armies of ants which moves across a country in irresisti- 
ble myriads, drowned by thousands m rivers, cut off by fire, 
consumed by man and beast, and yei fresh hordes succeeding 
interminably to supply their place. 

A new voice was heard : a new yearning upon earth ; mao 
pining at being severed from his brother, and longing to 
burst the false distinctions which had kept the best hearts 
from each other so long — an infant cry of life — the cry of the 
young Church of God. And all this from Judea — the nar- 
rowest, most bigoted, most intolerant nation on the face of 
the earth. 

Now I say that this was historically a new thing. 

2. It was new in extent. It was, in literal words, an old 
commandment given before both to Jew and Gentile. To 
the Jew, as, for instance, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as 
thyself; I am the Lord." To the Gentile, in the recognition 
which was so often made of the beauty of the law in its par- 
tial application, as in the case of friendship, patriotism, domes- 
tic attachment, and so on. 

But the difference lay in the extent in which these words 
" one another " were understood. By them, or rather by 
" neighbor," the Jew meant his countrymen ; and narrowed 
that down again to his friends among his countrymen — so 
that the well-known Rabbinical gloss upon these words, cur- 
rent in the days of Christ, was, " Thou shalt love thy neigh- 
bor and hate thine enemy." And what the Gentile under- 
stood by the extent of the law of love, we may learn from 
the well-known words of their best and wisest, who thanked 
heaven that he was born a man, and not a brute — a Greek, 
and not a barbarian : as if to be a barbarian were identical 
with being a brute. 

Now listen to Christ's exposition of the word neighbor. 
" Ye have heard that it was said. Thou shalt love thy neigh- 
bor and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you. Love your 
enemies." And he went farther : as a specimen of a neigh- 
bor, he specially selected one of that nation whom, as a theo* 
logian and a patriot, every Jew had been taught to hate; 



1 80 The New Commandmeni of 

And just as the application of electricity to the innumerable 
wants of human life and to new ends is reckoned a new dis- 
covery and invention of modern times (though the fact has 
been familiar for ages to the Indian child in the forest of 
the Far West, and applied by him for ages to his childish 
sports), so the extension of this grand principle of Love to 
all the possible cases of life, and to all possible persons — - 
even though the principle was known and applied long be 
fore, in love to friends, country, and relations — is truly and 
properly "a new commandment," a discovery, a gospel, a 
revelation. 

3. It was new in being made the central principle of a 
system. Never had obedience before been trusted to a prin- 
ciple : it had always been hedged round by a law. The 
religion of Christ is not a law, but a spirit ; not a creed, but 
a lite. To the one motive of love, God has intrusted the 
whole work of winning the souls of His redeemed. The heart 
of man was made for love — pants and pines for it : only in the 
love of Christ, and not in restrictions, can his soul expand. 
Now it was reserved for One to pierce, with the glance of in- 
tuition, down into the springs of human action, and to pro- 
claim the simplicity of its machinery. " Love," said the 
apostle after Him, " Love is the fulfilling of the law." 

We are told that in the new commandment the old per- 
ishes : that under the law of love, man is free from the law 
of works. Let us see how. 

Take any commandment — for example, the sixth, the sev- 
enth, the eighth. I may abstain from murder and theft, de- 
terred by law ; because law has annexed to them certain 
penalties. But I may also rise into the spirit of charity • 
then I am free from the law ; the law was not made for a 
righteous man : the law no more binds or restrains me, now 
that I love my neighbor, than the dike built to keep in the 
sea at high tide restrains it when that sea has sunk to low- 
water mark. 

Or the seventh. You may keep that law from dread of 
discovery, or you may learn a higher love : and then you can 
not injure a human soul ; you can not degrade a human 
spirit. Charity has made the old commandment superfluous. 
In the strong language of St. John, you can not sin, because 
you are born of God. 

It was the proclamation of this, the great living principle 
of human obedience, not with the pedantry of a philosopher, 
nor the exaggeration of an orator, but in the simple reality 
of life, which made this commandment of Christ a new com- 
mandment. 



Love^ to one Another, i8i 

11. The spirit or measure of the law — "as I have loved 
you." 

Broadly, the loV3 of Christ was the spirit of giving all He 
had to give. " Greater love hath no man than this, that a 
man lay down his life for his friend." Christ's love was not 
a sentiment ; it was a self-giving. To that His adversaries 
bore testimony : " He saved others ; himself He can not 
gave." Often as we have read these words, did it ever strike 
us, and if not, does it not bring a flash of surprise when we 
perceive it, that these words, meant as taunt, were really the 
noblest panegyric, a testimony higher and more adequate far 
than even that of the centurion? "He saved others; him- 
self He can not save." The first clause contained the answer 
to the second — " Himself He can not save !" How could He, 
having saved others ? How can any keep what he gives ? 
How can any live for self, when He is living for others? 
Unconsciously, those enemies were enunciating the very 
principle of Christianity, the grand law of all existence, that 
only by losing self you can save others ; that only by giving 
life you can bless. Love gives itself The mother spends 
herself in giving life to her child ; the soldier dies for his 
country; nay, even the artist produces nothing destined for 
immortality, nothing that will live^ except so far as he has 
forgotten himself, and merged his very being in his work. 

" He saved others ; himself He can not save." That was 
the love of Christ. Now to descend to particulars. 

That spirit of self-giving manifests itself in the shape of 
considerate kindliness. Take three cases : First, that in 
which he fed the people with bread. " I have compassion 
on the multitude, because they continue with me now three 
days, and have nothing to eat." There was a tenderness 
which, not absorbed in his own great designs, considered a 
number of small particulars of their state, imagined, provided, 
and this for the satisfaction of the lowest wants. Again, to 
the disciples : " Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, 
and rest awhile." He would not overwork them in the sub' 
limest service. He did not grudge from duty their interval 
of relaxation ; He even tenderly enforced it. Lastly, His' 
dying words : " Behold thy mother ! Woman, behold thy 
Bon !" Short sentences. He was too exhausted to say 
more. But in that hour of death-torture. He could think of 
her desolate state when he was gone, and with delicate, 
thoughtful attention provide for her well-being. 

There are people who would do great acts ; but because 
they wait for great opportunities, life passes, and the acts of 
love are not done at all. Observe, this considerateness of 



1 82 The New Commandment of 

Christ was shown in little things. And such are the parts 
of human life. Opportunities for doing greatly seldom occur ; 
life is made up of infinitesimals. If you compute the sum of 
happiness in any given day, you will find that it was com- 
posed of small attentions, kind looks, which made the heart 
swell, and stirred into health that sour, rancid film of misan- 
thropy which is apt to coagulate on the stream of our inward 
life, as surely as we liv<e in heart apart from our fellow-crea- 
tures. 

Doubtless the memory of each one of us will furnish him 
with the picture of some member of a family whose very 
presence seemed to shed happiness: a daughter, perhaps, 
whose light step, even in the distance, irradiated every one's 
countenance. What was the secret of such a one's power ? 
what had she done ? Absolutely nothing ; but radiant 
smiles, beaming good-humor, the tact of divining Avhat every 
one felt and every one wanted, told that she had got out of 
self and learned to think for others ; so that at one time it 
showed itself in deprecating the quarrel which lowering 
brows and raised tones already showed to be impending, by 
sweet words ; at another, by smoothing an invalid's pillow ; 
at another, by soothing a sobbing child ; at another, by hu- 
moring and softening a father who had returned, w^eary and 
ill-tempered from the irritating cares of business. None but 
she saw those things. None but a loving heart could see 
them. That was the secret of her heavenly power. 

Call you those things homely trifles, too homely for a ser- 
mon ? By reference to the character of Christ, they rise into 
something quite sublime. For that is loving as He loved. 
And remark, too, these trifles prepared for larger deeds. The 
one who w^ill be found in trial capable of great acts of love, 
is ever the one who is always doing considerate small ones. 
The soul which poured itself out to death upon the cross for 
the human race, was the Spirit of Him who thought of the 
wants of the people, contrived for the rest of the disciples, 
and was thoughtful for a mother. 

Once again — it was a love never foiled by the unworthiness 
of those on whom it had been once bestowed. It was a love 
which faults, desertion, denial, unfaithfulness could not chill, 
even though they wrung His heart. He had cliosen and He 
trusted. Even in ordinary manhood, that is a finely-temper- 
ed heart, one of no ordinary mould, which can say, "It ever 
was my way, and shall be still, when I do trust a man, to 
trust him wholly." 

And yet there was every thing to shake His trust in hu- 
manity. The Pharisees called him Good Master, and were 



Love to one Another. 183 

circumventing Him all the while. The people shouted ho* 
sannas, and three days afterwards wxre shrieking for His 
blood. One disciple who had dipped in the same dish, and 
been trusted with His inmost counsels, deceived and betrayed 
Him ; another was ashamed of Him ; three fell asleep while 
He was preparing for death ; all forsook Him. Yet nothing 
IS more surprising than that unshaken, I had well-nigh said 
obstinate^ trust with which He clung to His hopes of our 
nature, and believed in the face of demonstration. 

As we mix in life, there comes, especially to sensitive na° 
tures, a temptation to distrust. In young life we throw our- 
selves with unbounded and glorious confidence on such as 
we think well of — an error soon corrected : for we soon find 
out — too soon — that men and women are not what they 
seem. Then comes disappointment ; and the danger is a re- 
action of desolating and universal mistrust. For if we look 
on the doings of man with a merely worldly eye, and pierce 
below the surface of character, we are ajDt to feel bitter scorn 
and disgust for our fellow-creatures. We have lived to see 
human hollowness ; the ashes of the Dead Sea shore ; the 
falseness of what seemed so fair; the mouldering beneath 
the whited sepulchre : and no wonder if we are tempted to 
think " friendship all a cheat — smiles hypocrisy — words de- 
ceit ;" and they who are what is called knovmig in life con- 
tract by degrees, as the result of their experience, a hollow 
distrust of men, and learn to sneer at apparently good mo- 
tives — that demoniacal sneer which we have seen, ay, per- 
haps felt, curling the lip at times, " Doth Job serve God for 
naught ?" 

The only preservation from this withering of the heart is 
love. Love is its own perennial fount of strength. The 
strength of affection is a proof not of the worthiness of the 
object, but of the largeness of the soul which loves. Love 
descends, not ascends. The might of a river depends not on 
the quality of the soil through which it passes, but on the in- 
exhaustibleness and depth of the spring from which it pro- 
ceeds. The greater mind cleaves to the smaller with more 
force than the other to it. A parent loves the child more 
than the child the parent ; and partly because the parent's 
heart is larger, not because the child is worthier. The Sav- 
iour loved His disciples infinitely more than His disciples 
loved Him, because His heart was infinitely larger. Love 
trusts on — ever hopes and expects better things ; and this, a 
trust springing from itself and out of its own deeps alone. 

And more than this. It is this trusting love that makes 
men what they are trusted to be — so realizing itself. Would 



1 84 The New Commandment^ Etc, 

you make men trustworthy? Trust them. Would you 
make them true ? Believe them. This was the real force 
of that sublime battle-cry which no Englishman hears with- 
out emotion. When the crews of the fleet of Britain knew 
that they were expected to do their duty, they did their duty. 
They felt, in that spirit-stirring sentence, that they were 
trusted ; and the simultaneous cheer that rose from every 
ship was a forerunner of victory — the battle was half-won al- 
ready. They went to serve a country which expected from 
them great things, and they did great things. Those preg- 
nant words raised an enthusiasm for the chieftain who had 
thrown himself upon his men in trust, which a double line of 
hostile ships could not appall, nor decks drenched in blood 
extinguish. 

And it is on this principle that Christ wins the hearts of 
His redeemed. He trusted the doubting Thomas, and Thom- 
as arose with a faith worthy " of his Lord and his God." He 
would not suffer even the lie of Peter to shake His convic- 
tion that Peter might love him yet, and Peter answered no- 
bly to that sublime forgiveness. His last prayer was in ex- 
tenuation and hope for the race who had rejected Him, and 
the kingdoms of the world are become His own. He has 
loved us, God knows why — I do not — and w^e, all unworthy 
though we be, respond faintly to that love, and try to be 
what He would have us. 

Therefore come what may, hold fast to love. Though men 
should rend your heart, let them not embitter or harden it. 
We win by tenderness, we conquer by forgiveness. Oh, 
strive to enter into something of that large celestial charity 
which is meek, enduring, unretaliating, and which even the 
overbearing world can not withstand forever. Learn the 
new commandment of the Son of God. Not to love merely, 
but to love as He loved. Go forth in this spirit to your life- 
duties: go forth, children of the Cross, to carry every tiling 
before you, and win victories for God by the conquering 
power of a love like His. 



The Message of the Church to Men of Wealth, 1 85 



xvn. 

THE MESSAGE OF THE CHURCH TO MEN OP 
WEALTH. 

"And Nabal answered David's servants, and said, Who is David? and 
who is the son of Jesse? There be many servants nowadays that breals 
away every man from his master. Shall I then take my bread, and my 
water, and my flesh that I have killed for my shearers, and give it unto men, 
whom I know not whence they be?" — 1 Sam. xxv. 10, 11. 

I HAVE selected this passage for our subject this evening, 
because it is one of the earliest cases recorded in the Bible 
in which the interests of the employer and the employed, 
the man of wealth and the man of work, stood, or seemed to 
Btand, in antagonism to each other. 

It was a period in which an old system of things was 
breaking up, and the new one was not yet established. The 
patriarchal relationship of tutelage and dependence was 
gone, and monarchy was not yet in firm existence. Saul 
was on the throne but his rule was irregular and disputed. 
Many things were slowly growing up into custom which had 
not yet the force of law ; and the first steps by which cus- 
tom passes into law from precedent to precedent are often 
steps at every one of which struggle and resistance must 
take place. 

The history of the chapter is briefly this : Nabal, the 
wealthy sheep-master, fed his flocks in the pastures of Car- 
mel. David was leader of a band of men who got their liv- 
ing by the sword on the same hills : outlaws, whose excesses 
he in some degree restrained, and over whom he retained a 
leader's influence. A rude irregular honor was not unknown 
among those fierce men. They honorably abstained from 
injuring Xabal's flocks. They did more: they protected 
them from all harm against the marauders of the neighbor- 
hood. By the confession of Nabal's own herdsmen, " they 
were a wall unto them both by night and day, all the time 
they were with them keeping their flocks." 

And thus a kind of right grew up: irregular enough, but 
sufficient to establish a claim on Nabal for remuneration of 
these services ; a new claim, not admitted by him : reckoned 
by him an exaction, which could be enforced by no law; 



1 86 The Message of the Church 

only by that law which is above all statute-law, deciding ao 
cording to emergencies — an indefinable instinctive sense of 
fairness and justice. But as there was no law, and each man 
was to himself a law, and the sole arbiter of his own rights, 
what help was there but that disputes should rise between 
the wealthy proprietors and their self-constituted champions, 
with exaction and tyranny on the one side, churlishness and 
parsimony on the other ? Hence a fruitful and ever-fresh 
source of struggle : the one class struggling to take as much, 
and the other to give as little as possible. In modern lan- 
guage, the Rights of Labor were in conflict with the Rights 
of Property. 

The story proceeds thus : David presented a demand, mod- 
erate and courteous enough (vs. 6, 7, 8). It was refused by 
iNabal, and added to the refusal were those insulting taunts 
of low birth and outcast condition which are worse than 
injury, and sting, making men's blood run fire. One court 
of appeal was left. There remained nothing but the trial by 
force. " Gird ye on," said David, " every man his sword." 

Now observe the fearful, hopeless character of this strug- 
gle. The question had come to this : whether David, with 
his ferocious and needy six hundred mountaineers, united by 
the sense of wrong, or Nabal, with his well-fed and trained 
hirelings, bound by interest and not by love to his cause, 
were stronger ? Which was the more powerful — want whet- 
ted by insult, or selfishness pampered by abundance ; they 
who wished to keep by force, or they who wished to take ? 
An awful and uncertain spectacle, but the spectacle which is 
exhibited in every country where rights are keenly felt, and 
duties lightly regarded — where insolent demand is met by in- 
sulting defiance. Wherever classes are held apart by rivalry 
and selfishness, instead of drawn together by the law of love 
— wherever there has not been established a kingdom of 
heaven, but only a kingdom of the world — there exist the 
forces of inevitable collision. 

I. The causes of this false social state. 
II. The message of the Church to the man of wealth. 

I. False basis on which social superiority was held to rest. 
Throughout Nabal's conduct was built uj^on the assump- 
tion of his own superiority. He was a man of wealth. Da- 
vid was dependent on his own daily efibrts. Was not that 
enough to settle the question of superiority and inferiority? 
It was enough on both sides for a long time, till the falsehood 
of the assumption became palpable and intolerable. But pal- 
j)able and intolerable it did become at last. 



To Men of Wealth, 187 

A social falsehood will be borne long, even with consider- 
able inconvenience, until it forces itself obtrusively on men's 
attention, and can be endured no longer. The exact point 
at which this social falsehood, that wealth constitutes supe- 
riority, and has a right to the subordination of inferiors, be- 
comes intolerable, varies according to several circumstances. 

The evils of poverty are comparative — they depend on cli- 
mate. In warm climates, where little food, no fuel, and scan- 
ty shelter are required, the sting is scarcely felt till poverty 
becomes starvation. They depend on contrast. Far above 
the point where poverty becomes actual famine, it may be- 
come unbearable if contrasted strongly with the unnecessary 
luxury and abundance enjoyed by the classes above. Where 
all suffer equally, as men and officers suffer in an Arctic voy- 
age, men bear hardship with cheerfulness : but where the suf- 
fering weighs heavily on some, and the luxury of enjoyment 
is out of all proportion monopolized by a few, the point of 
reaction is reached long before penury has become actual 
want : or again, when wealth or rank assumes an insulting, 
domineering character — when contemptuous names for the 
poor are invented, and become current among the more un- 
feeling of a wealthy class — then the falsehood of superiority 
can be tolerated no longer : for we do not envy honors w^hich 
are meekly borne, nor wealth w^hich is unostentatious. 

Now it was this which brought matters to a crisis. David 
had borne poverty long — nay, he and his men had long en- 
dured the contrast between their own cavern-homes and beds 
upon the rock, and Nabal's comforts. But when Nabal add- 
ed to this those pungent biting sneers which sink into poor 
men's hearts and rankle — which are not forgotten, but come 
out fresh in the day of retribution — " Who is David ? and 
who is the son of Jesse? There be many servants nowadays 
that break away every man from his master," then David 
began to measure himself with Nabal; not a wiser man--— nor 
a better — nor even a stronger. Who is this Nabal ? Intel- 
lectually, a fool; morally, a profligate, drowning reason in 
excess of wine at the annual sheep-shearing ; a tyrant over 
his slaves — overbearing to men who only ask of him their 
rights. Then rose the question which Nabal had better not 
have forced men to answer for themselves. By what right 
does this possessor of wealth lord it over men who are infe- 
rior in no one particular? 

Now observe two things. 

1. An apparent inconsistency in David's conduct. David 
had received injury after injury from Saul, and had only for- 
given. One injury from Nabal, and David is striding over 



1 88 The Message of the Church 

the hills to revenge his wrong with naked steel. How came 
this reverence and irreverence to mix together ? 

We reply. Saul had a claim of authority on David's al- 
legiance ; Nabal only one of rank. Between these the Bible 
makes a vast difference. It says, The potmrs which be are 
ordained of God. But upper and lower^ as belonging to dif- 
ference in property, are fictitious terms: true, if character 
corresponds with titular superiority; false, if it does not. 
And such was the difference manifested in the life of the Son 
of God. To lawful authority, whether Roman, Jewish, or 
even priestly. He paid deference ; but to the titled mark of 
conventional distinction, none. Rabbi, Rabbi, was no Divine 
authority. It was not power, a delegated attribute of God — 
it was only a name. In Saul, therefore, David reverenced 
one his superior in authority ; but in Nabal he only had be- 
fore him one surpassing him in wealth. And David refused, 
somewhat too rudely, to acknowledge the bad, great man as 
his superior: would pay him no reverence, respect, or alle- 
giance whatever. Let us mark that distinction well, so often 
confused — kings, masters, parents : here is a power ordained 
of God. Honor it. But wealth, name, title, distinctions, 
always fictitious, often false and vicious, if you can claim 
homage for these separate from worth, you confound two 
things essentially different. Try that by the test of His life. 
Name the text where Christ claimed reverence for wealth 
or rank. On the Mount did the Son of Man bow the knee 
to the majesty of wealth and wrong, or was His Sonship 
shown in this, that He would not bow down to that as if of 
God? 

2. This great falsehood respecting superior and inferior 
rested on a truth. There had been a superiority in the 
wealthy class once. In the patriarchal system wealth and 
rule had gone together. The father of the family and tribe 
was the one in whom proprietorship was centred; but the 
patriarchal system had passed away. Men like Nabal suc- 
ceeded to the patriarch's wealth, and expected the subordi- 
nation which had been yielded to patriarchal character and 
^position ; and this when every particular of relationship was 
altered. Once the patriarch was the protector of his depend- 
ents. Now David's class was independent, and the protect- 
ors, rather than the protected : at all events, able to defend 
themselves. Once the rich man was ruler in virtue of pa- 
ternal relationship. Now wealth was severed from rule and 
relationship : a man might be rich, yet neither a ruler, nor a 
protector, nor a kinsman. And the fallacy of Nabal's expec- 
tation consisted in this, that he demanded for wealth that 



To Men of Wealth, 189 

reverence which had once been due to men who happened to 
be wealthy. 

It is a fallacy in which we are perpetually entangled. 
We expect reverence for that which was once a symbol of 
what was reverenced, but is reverenced no longer. Here in 
England it is common to complain that there is no longer any 
respect of inferiors towards superiors — that servants were 
once devoted and grateful, tenants submissive, subjects en- 
thusiastically loyal. But we forget that servants were once 
protected by their masters, and tenants safe from wrong 
only through the guardianship of their powerful lords ; that 
thence a personal gratitude grew up ; that now they are pro- 
tected by the law from wrong by a different social system 
altogether ; and that the individual bond of gratitude sub- 
sists' no longer. We expect that to masters and employers 
the same reverence and devotedness shall be rendered Avhich 
were due to them under other circumstances, and for differ- 
ent reasons ; as if wealth and rank had ever been the claim to 
reverence, and not merely the accidents and accompaniments 
of the claim — as if any thing less sacred than holy ties could 
purchase sacred feelings — as if the homage of free manhood 
could be due to gold and name — as if to the mere Nabal-fool 
who is labelled as worth so much, and whose signature car- 
ries with it so much coin, the holiest and most ennobling 
sensations of the soul, reverence and loyalty, were due by 
God's appointment. 

No. That patriarchal system has passed forever. Xo 
sentimental wailings for the past, no fond regrets for the 
virtues of a by-gone age, no melancholy, poetical, retrospect- 
ive antiquarianism can restore it. In Church and State the 
past is past : and you can no more bring back the blind 
reverence, than the rude virtues of those days. The day has 
come in which, if feudal loyalty or patriarchal reverence are 
to be commanded, they must be won by patriarchal virtues 
or feudal real superiorities. 

n. Cause of this unhealthy social state : A false concep- 
tion respecting rights. 

It would be unjust to Xabal to represent this as an act of 
i^illful oppression and conscious injustice. He did what ap- 
peared to him fair between man and man. He paid his 
laborers. Why should he pay any thing beyond stipulated 
wages ? 

David^s demand appeared an extravagant and insolent 
one, provoking unfeigned astonishment and indignation. It 
was an invasion of his rijjhts. It was a dictation with re- 



1 90 The Message of the Church 

spect to the employment of that which was his own. " Shall 
I then take my bread, and my w^ater, and my flesh that I 
have killed for my shearers, and give it unto men whom I 
know not whence they be ?" 

Recollect, too, there was something to be said for Nabal. 
This view of the irresponsible right of property was not his 
invention. It w^as the view probably entertained by all his 
class. It had descended to him from his parents. They 
were prescriptive and admitted rights on which he stood. 
And however false or unjust a prescriptive right may be, 
however baseless w^hen examined, there is much excuse for 
those who have inherited and not invented it ; for it is hard 
to see through the falsehood of any system by which we 
profit, and which is upheld by general consent, especially 
when good men too ujDhold it. Rare indeed is that pure- 
heartedness which sees with eagle glance through conven- 
tionalisms. This is a wrong, and I and my own class are 
the doers of it. 

On the other hand, David and his needy followers were 
not slow^ to perceive that they had their rights over that 
property of Nabal's, 

Men on whom wrongs press are the first to feel them, and 
their cries of pain and indignation are the appointed means 
of God to direct to their wrongs the attention of society. 
Very often the fierce and maddened shriek of sufiering is 
the first intimation that a wrong exists at all. 

There was no law in Israel to establish David's claims. 
This guardianship of Nabal's flocks was partly a self-consti- 
tuted thing. No bargain had been made, no sum of reward 
expressly stipulated. But there is a law besides and above 
all written law, w^hich gives to written law^s their authority, 
and from Avhich so often as they diverge, it is w^oe to the 
framers of the law : for their law must perish, and the 
Eternal Law unseen will get itself acknow^ledged as a truth 
from heaven or a truth from hell — a truth begirt with fire 
and sword, if they will not read it except so. 

In point of fact, David had a right to a share of Nabal's 
profits. The harvest was in part David's harvest, for with- 
feut Dflvid it never could have been reaped. The sheep were 
in part David's sheep, for without David not a sheep would 
have been spared by the marauders of the hills. Not a 
sheaf of corn was carried to Nabal's barn, nor a night passed 
in repose by Nabal's shepherds, but what told of the share 
of David in the saving of that sheaf, and the procurement of 
that repose (not tlie k'ss real because it Avas past and un- 
Been). The right which the soldier has by law to his pay, 



To Men of Wealth. 1 9 \ 



iviis one right whicli David had by unwritten law — a right 
resting on the fact that his services were indispensable for 
the harvest. 

Here, then, is one of the earliest instances of the Rights 
of Labor coming into collision with the Rights of Property : 
rights shadowy, undefined, perpetually shifting their bound- 
aries, varying with every case, altering with every age, in- 
capable of being adjusted except rudely by law, and leaving 
always something which the most subtle and elaborate law 
can not define, and which in any moment may grow up into 
a wrong. 

Now when it comes to this. Rights against Rights, there 
is no determination of the question but by overwhelming 
numbers or blood. David's remedy was a short, sharp, de- 
cisive one. " Gird ye on every man his sword." And it is 
difficult, for the sake of humanity, to say to which side in 
such a quarrel we should wish well. If the rich man succeed 
in civil war, he will bind the chain of degradation more se- 
verely and more surely for years, or ages, on the crushed serf. 
If the champions of popular rights succeed by the sword, 
you may then await in awe the reign of tyranny, licentious- 
ness, and lawlessness. For the victory of the lawless, with 
the memory of past wrongs to avenge, is almost more san- 
guinary than the victory of those who have had power long, 
and w^hose power had been defied. 

We find another cause in circumstances. Want and un- 
just exclusion precipitated David and his men into this re- 
bellion. It is common enough to lay too much weight on 
circumstances. Nothing can be more false than the popular 
theory that ameliorated outward condition is the panacea for 
the evils of society. The Gospel principle begins from with 
in, and works outward. 

The world's principle begins w4th the outward condition, 
and expects to influence inwardly. To expect that by chang- 
ing the world without, in order to suit the world within, by 
taking away all difficulties and removing all temptations, in- 
stead of hardening the man within against the force of out- 
ward temptation — to adapt the lot to the man, instead of 
moulding the spirit to the lot, is to reverse the Gospel method 
of procedure. Nevertheless, even that favorite speculation 
of theorists, that perfect circumstances will produce perfect 
character, contains a truth. Circumstances of outward con- 
dition are not the sole efficients in the production of charac- 
ter, but they are efficients which must not be ignored. Fa- 
vorable condition will not produce excellence, but the want 
of it often hinders excellence. It is true that vice leads to 



IQ2 The Message of the Church 

poverty : all the moralizers tell us that, but it is also true 
that poverty leads to vice. 

There are some in this world to whom, speaking humanly- 
social injustice and social inequalities have made goodness 
impossible. Take, for instance, the case of these bandits on 
Mount Carmel. Some of them were outlawed by their own 
crimes, but others doubtless by debts not willfully contracted 
— one at least, David, by a most unjust and unrighteous per- 
secution. And these men, excluded, needy, exasperated by a 
sense of wrong, untaught outcasts, could you gravely expect 
from them obedience, patience, meekness, religious resigna- 
tion ? Yes, my brethren, that is exactly the marvellous im- 
possibility people do most inconsistently expect; and there 
are no bounds to their astonishment if they do not get what 
they expect: Superhuman honesty from starving men, to 
whom life by hopelessness has become a gambler's desperate 
chance ! chivalrous loyalty and high forbearance from crea- 
tures to whom the order of society has presented itself only 
as an unjust system of partiality ! We forget that forbearance 
and obedience are the very last and highest lessons learned by 
the spirit in its most careful training. By those unhallowed 
conventionalisms through which we, like heathens, and not 
like Christians, crush the small offender and court the great 
one — that damnable cowardice by which we banish the se- 
duced and half admire the seducer — by which, in defiance of 
all manliness and all generosity, we punish the weak and 
tempted, and let the tempter go free : — by all these we make 
men and women outcasts, and then expect from them the 
sublimest graces of reverence and resignation \ 

n. The message of the Church to the man of wealth. 

The message of the Church contains those principles of 
life which, carried out, would, and hereafter will, realize the 
Divine Order of Society. The revealed Message does not 
create the facts of our humanity — it simply makes them 
known. The Gospel did not make God our Father, it au- 
thoritatively reveals that He is so. It did not create a new 
duty of loving one another, it revealed the old duty which 
existed from eternity., and must exist as long as humanity is 
humanity. It was no " new commandment," but an old com- 
mandment which had been heard from the beginning. 

The Church of God is that living body of men who are 
called by Him out of the world, not to be the inventors of a 
new social system, but to exhibit in the world by word and 
life, chiefly by life, what Humanity is, was, and will be, in 
vhe idea of God. "JSTow so far as the social economy is con" 



To Men of Wealth. 193 

cerned, the revelations of the Church will coincide with the 
discoveries of a Scientific Political Economy. Political 
Economy discovers slowly the facts of the immutable law^s 
of social well-being. But the living principles of those laws, 
which cause them to be obeyed, Christianity has revealed to 
[living hearts long before. The Spirit discovers them to the 
spirit. For instance, Political Economy, gazing on such a 
fact, as this of civil w^ar, would arrive at the same principles 
w^hich the Church arrives at. She too would say, Not self- 
ishness, but love. Only that she arrives at these principles 
by experience, not intuition — by terrible lessons, not revela- 
tion — by revolutions, wars, and famines, not by spiritual im- 
pulses of charity. 

And so because these principles were eternally true in hu- 
manity, we find in the conduct of Abigail towards David in 
this early age, not explicitly, but implicity, the very princi- 
ples w^hich the Church of Christ has given to the world ; and 
more — the very principles which a sound political economy 
would sanction. In her reply to David we have the antici« 
pation by a loving heart of those duties which selfish pru- 
dence must have taught at last. 

1. The spiritual dignity of man as man. Recollect David 
'vas the poor man, but Abigail, the high-born lady, admits 
his worth : " The Lord will certainly make my lord a sure 
house ; because my lord fighteth the battles of the Lord, and 
evil hath not been found in thee all th}^ days." Here is a 
truth revealed to that age. Nabal's day, and the day of such 
as Nabal, is past ; another powder is rising above the horizon. 
David's cause is God's cause. Worth does not mean what a 
man is worth — you must find some better definition than 
that. 

Xow this is the very truth revealed in the Incarnatioru 
David, Israel's model king, the king by the grace of God, not 
by the conventional rules of human choice — is a shepherd's 
son. Christ, the King who is to reign over our regenerated 
humanity, is humbly born — the poor woman's Son. That is 
the Church's message to the man of wealth, and a message 
which it seems has to be learned afresh in every age. It was 
new to Nabal. It was new to the men of the age of Christ. 
In His day they were ofiended in Him, because He was hum- 
bly born. "Is not this the carpenter's son?" It is the of- 
fense now. They who retain those superstitious ideas of the 
eternal superiority of rank and wealth have the first princi- 
ples of the Gospel yet to 2earn. How can they believe in the 
Son of Mary ? They may honor Him with the lip, they deny 
him in Hia brethren. Whoever helps to keep alive that an* 



1 94 The Message of the Church 

cient lie of upper and lower, resting the distinction not on 
official authority or personal worth, but on wealth and title, 
is doing his part to hinder the establishment of the Redeem- 
er's kingdom. 

Now the Church of Christ proclaims that truth in baptism. 
She speaks of a kingdom here in which all are, as spirits, 
equal. She reveals a fact. She does not affect to create the 
fact. She says — not hypothetically, "This child maybe the 
child of God if prevenient grace has taken place, or if here- 
after he shall have certain feelings and experiences ;" nor, 
" Hereby I create this child magically by supernatural power 
in one moment what it was not a moment before :" but she 
says, authoritatively, " I pronounce this child the child of 
God : the brother of Christ the First-born — the Son of Him 
who has taught us by His Son to call Him our Father, not 
my Father. Whatever that child may become hereafter in 
fact, he is now, by right of creation and redemption, the child 
Vf God. Rich or poor, titled or untitled, he shares the spirit- 
ual nature of the second Adam — the Lord from heaven." 

2. The second truth expressed by Abigail was the law of 
Sacrifice. She did not heal the grievance with smooth words. 
Starving men are not to be pacified by professions of good- 
will. She brought her two hundred loaves, and her two 
skins of wine, her five sheep ready dressed, etc. A princely 
provision ! 

You might have said this was waste — half would have 
been enough. But the truth is, liberality is a most real econ- 
omy. She could not stand there calculating the smallest pos- 
sible expense at which the aflront might be wiped out. True 
economy is to pay liberally and fairly for faithful service. 
The largest charity is the be^t economy. Nabal had had a 
faithful servant. He should have counted no expense too 
great to retain his services, instead of cheapening and de- 
preciating them. But we wrong Abigail if we call this econ- 
omy or calculation. In fact, had it been done on economical 
principles, it would have failed. Ten times this sum from 
Nabal would not have arrested revenge. For Nabal it was 
too late. Concessions extracted by fear only provoke ex- 
action further. The poor know well what is given because 
it must be given, and what is conceded from a sense of jus- 
tice. They/ee^ only what is real. David's men and David 
felt that these were not the gifts of a sordid calculation, but 
the offerings of a generous heart. And it won them — their 
gratitude — their enthusiasm — their unfeigned homage. 

This is the attractive power of that great law, whose high- 
est expression was the Cross. " I, if I be lifted up, will draw 



To Men of Wealth, 195 

all men unto Me." Say what you will, it is not interest, but 
the sight of noble qualities and true sacrifice, which com- 
niands the devotion of the world. Yea, even the bandit and 
the outcast will bend before that as before a Divine thing. In 
one form or another, it draws all men, it commands all men. 

Now this the Church proclaims as part of its special mes- 
sage to the rich. It says that the Divine Death was a Sac- 
rifice. It declares that death to be the law of every life 
which is to be like His. It says that the law, which alone 
can interpret the mystery of life, is the self-sacrifice of Christ. 
It proclaims the law of His life to have been this : "For their 
sakes I devote (sanctify) Myself, that they also may be de- 
voted through the truth." 

In other words, the self-saorifice of the Redeemer was to 
be the living principle and law of the self-devotion of His 
people. It asserts that to be the principle which alone can 
make any human life a true life. " I fill up that which is be- 
hind of the afllictions of Christ in my flesh, for His body's 
sake, which is the Church." We have petrified that sacrifice 
into a dead theological dogma, about the exact efiicacy of 
which we dispute metaphysically, and charge each other with 
heresy. That Atonement will become a living fact only 
when we humbly recognize in it the eternal fact that sacri- 
fice is the law of life. The very mockers at the crucifixion 
unwittingly declared the principle : " He saved others : him- 
self He can not save." Of course — how could He save him- 
self who had to save others? You can only save others 
when you have ceased to think of saving your own soul; 
you can only truly bless when you have done with the pur- 
suit of personal happiness. -Did you ever hear of a soldier 
who saved his country by making it his chief work to secure 
himself? And was the Captain of our salvation to become 
the Saviour by contravening that universal law of sacrifice, 
or by obeying it ? 

Brother men, the early Church gave expression to that 
principle of sacrifice in a very touching way. They had all 
things in common. " Neither said any of them that aught 
of the things which he possessed was his own." They failed, 
not because they declared that, but because men began to 
think that the duty of sharing was compulsory. They pro- 
claimed principles which were unnatural, inasmuch as they 
set aside all personal feelings, which are part of our nature 
too. They virtually compelled private property to cease, 
because he who retained private property when all were 
giving up was degraded, and hence became a hypocrite and 
liar, like Ananias. 



19^ The Message of the Church 

But let us not lose the truth which they expressed in an 
exaggerated way : " Neither said any of them that aught of 
the things which he possessed was his own." Property is 
sacred. It is private property ; if it were not, it could not 
be sacrificed. If it were to be shared equally by the idle 
and the industrious, there could be no love in giving. Prop' 
erty is the rich man's own. Nabal is right in saying, My 
bread — my water — my flesh. But there is a higher riiiht 
which says, It is not yours. And that voice speaks to every 
rich man in one way or another, according as he is selfish or 
unselfish : coming as a voice of terror or a voice of blessing. 
It came to Nabal with a double curse, turning his heart into 
stone with the vision of the danger and the armed ranks of 
David's avengers, and laying on David's soul the sin of in- 
tended murder. It came to the heart of Abigail with a 
double blessing : blessing her who gave and him who took. 

To the spirit of the Cross alone we look as the remedy for 
social evils. When the people of this great country, espe- 
cially the rich, shall have been touched with the spirit of 
the Cross to a largeness of sacrifice of which they have not 
dreamed as yet, there will be an atonement between the 
Rights of Labor and the Rights of Property. 

3. The last part of the Church's message to the man of 
wealth touches the matter of rightful influence. 

Very remarkable is the demeanor of David towards Nabal, 
as contrasted with his demeanor towards Abigail. In the 
one case, defiance, and a haughty self-assertion of equality ; in 
the other, deference, respect, and the most eloquent bene- 
diction. It was not therefore against the wealthy class, bat 
against individuals of the class,- that the wrath of these men 
burned. 

See, then, the folly and the falsehood of the sentimental 
regret that there is no longer any reverence felt towards 
superiors. There is reverence to superiors, if only it can be 
shown that they are superiors. Reverence is deeply rooted 
in the heart of humanity — you can not tear it out. Civiliza- 
tion — science — progress — only change its direction : they do 
not weaken its force. If it no longer bows before crucifixes 
and candles, priests and relics, it is not extinguished towards 
what is truly sacred and what is priestly in man. The 
fiercest revolt against false authority is only a step towards 
submission to rightful authority. Emancipation from false 
lords only sets the heart free to honor true ones. The free- 
born David will not do homage to Nabal. Well, now go 
and mourn over the degenerate age which no .longer feels 
respect for that which is above it. But behold — David has 



To Men of Wealth. 197 

found a something nobler than himself. Feminine charity — 
sacrifice and justice — and in gratitude and profoundest 
respect he bows to that. The state of society which is 
coming is not one of protection and dependence, nor one 
of mysterious authority, and blind obedience to it, nor one 
in which any class shall be privileged by Divine right, and 
another remain in perpetual tutelage ; but it is one in which 
unselfish services and personal qualities will command, by 
Divine right, gratitude and admiration, and secure a true 
and spiritual leadership. 

Oh, let not the rich misread the signs of the times, or mis- 
take their brethren: they have less and less respect for ti- 
tles and riches, for vestments and ecclesiastical pretensions, 
but they have a real respect lor sui^erior knowledge and su- 
perior goodness : they listen like children to those whom 
they believe to know a subject better than themselves. Let 
those who know it say whether there is not something inex- 
pressibly touching and even humbling in the large, hearty, 
manly, English reverence and love which the working-men 
show towards those who love and serve them truly, and 
save them from themselves and from doing wrong. See how 
David's feelings gush forth : " Blessed be the Lord God of 
Israel which sent thee this day to meet me : and blessed be 
thy advice, and blessed be thou which hast kept me this day 
from coming to shed blood, and from avenging myself with 
mine own hand," 

The rich and the great may have that love if they will. 

To conclude. Doubtless David was wrong : he had no 
right even to redress wrongs thus ; patience was his divinely 
appointed duty; and doubtless in such circumstances we 
should be very ready to preach submission and to blame 
David. Alas ! we, the clergy of the Church of England, 
have been only too ready to do this : for three long centu- 
ries we have taught submission to the powers that be, as if 
that were the only text in Scripture bearing on the relations 
between the ruler and the ruled. Rarely have we dared to 
demand of the powers that be, justice ; of the wealthy man 
and the titled, duties. We have produced folios of slavish 
flattery upon the Divine Right of Power. Shame on us ! 
we have not denounced the Avrongs done to weakness : and 
yet for one text in the Bible which requires submission and 
patience from the poor, you will find a hundred which de- 
nounce the vices of the rich — in the writings of the noble 
old Jewish prophets, that^ and almost that only — that^ in the 
Old Testament, with a deep roll of words that sound like Si- 
nai thunders : and that in the New Testament in words lesf 



ipS Christ's yudgment Respecting Inheritance, 

impassioned and more calmly terrible from the apostles anq 
their Master : and woe to us in the great day of God, if we 
have been the sycophants of the rich instead of the redressera 
of the poor man's wrongs — woe to us if we have been tutor- 
ing David into respect to his superior, Nabal, and forgotten 
that David's cause, not Nabal's, is the cause of God. 



XVIII. 

CHRIST'S JUDGMENT RESPECTING INHERIT- 
ANCE.* 

•'And one of the company said unto him, Master, speak to my brother, 
that he divide the inheritance with rae. And he said unto him, Man, who 
made me a judge or a divider over you? And he said unto them, Take 
heed, and beware of covetousness : for a man's Hfe consisteth not in the 
abundance of the things which he possesseth. " — Luke xii. 13-15. 

The Son of God was misunderstood and misinterpreted in 
His day. With this fact we are familiar ; but we are not at 
all familiar with the consideration that it was very natural 
<lhat He should be so mistaken. 

He went about Galilee and Judea proclaiming the down- 
fall of every injustice, the exposure and confutation of every 
lie. He denounced the lawj^ers who refused education to 
the people, in order that they might retain the key of knowl- 
edge in their own hands. He reiterated Woe ! woe ! woe ! 
to the Scribes and Pharisees, who revered the past, while 
systematically persecuting every new prophet and every 
brave man who rose up to vindicate the spirit of the past 
against the institutions of the past. He spoke parables 
which bore hard on the men of wealth : that, for instance, 
of the rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen, 
and fared sumptuously every day, who died, and in hell lift 
up his eyes, being in torments — that of the wealthy proprie- 
tor who prospered in the world ; who pulled down his barns 
to build greater ; who all the while was in the sight of God 
a fool ; who in front of judgment and eternity was found un- 
ready. He stripped the so-called religious party of that day 
of their respectability, convicted them, to their own astonish- 
ment, of hypocrisy, and called them " whited sepulchres." 

* This Sermon was preached the Sunday after that on which "The Mes- 
sage of the CImrch to Men of Wealth " was preached, and it was intended ac 
a further iUustration of that subject. 



Christ's yudgmejii Respecting Inheritance, 1 99 

He said God was against them ; that Jerusalem's day waa 
come, and that she must fail. 

And now consider candidly : — suppose that all this had 
taken place in this country ; that an unknown stranger, 
with no ordination, with no visible authority, basing his au- 
thority upon his truth, and his agreement with the mind of 
God the Father, had appeared in this England, uttering half 
the severe things He spoke against the selfishness of wealth, 
against ecclesiastical authorities, against the clergy, against 
the popular religious party — suppose that such an one should 
say that our whole social life is corrupt and false — suppose 
that instead of " thou blind Pharisee," the word had been 
" thou blind Churchman !" 

Should we have fallen at the feet of such an one and said, 
Lo ! this is a message from Almighty God, and He who 
brings it is a Son of God ; perhaps what He says Himself, 
His only Son — God — of God ? Or should we not have rath' 
er said. This is dangerous teaching, and revolutionary in its 
tendencies, and He who teaches it is an incendiary — a mad, 
democratical, dangerous fanatic ? 

That was exactly what they did say of your Redeemer in 
His day ; nor does it seem at all wonderful that they did. 

The sober, respectable inhabitants of Jerusalem, very 
comfortable themselves, and utterly unable to conceive 
why things should not go on as they had been going on 
for a hundred years — not smarting from the misery and the 
moral degradation of the lazars with whom He associated, 
and under whose burdens his loving spirit groaned — thought 
it excessively dangerous to risk the subversion of their quiet 
enjoyment by such outcries. They said, prudent men ! " If 
He is permitted to go on this way, the Romans will come 
and take away our place and nation." The priests and Phar- 
isees, against whom He had specially spoken, were fiercer 
still. They felt there was no time to be lost. 

But still more. His own friends and followers misunder- 
stood Him. 

They heard him speak of a kingdom of justice and right- 
eousness in which every man should receive the due reward 
of his deeds. They heard Him say that this kingdom was 
not far off, but actually among them, hindered only by their 
sins and dullness from immediate appearance. Men's souls 
were stirred and agitated. They were ripe for any thing, 
and any spark would have produced explosion. They 
thought the next call would be to take the matter into their 
own hands. 

Accordingly, on one occasion, St. John and St. James asked 



200 Christ's judgment Respecting Lzherita^ice, 

permission to call down fire from heaven upon a village of 
the Samaritans which would not receive their message. 
On another occasion, on a single figurative mention of a 
sword, they began to gird themselves for the struggle : 
"Lord," said one, "behold here are two swords." Again, as 
soon as He entered Jerusalem for the last time, the populace 
heralded His way w^ith shouts, thinking that the long-delay- 
ed hour of retribution was come at last. They saw the Con- 
queror before them who was to vindicate their wrongs. In 
imagination they already felt their feet upon the necks of 
their enemies. 

And because their hopes were disappointed, and He waa 
not the demagogue they wanted, therefore they turned 
against Him. Not the Pharisees only, but the people whom 
He had come to save — the outcast, and the publican, and the 
slave, and the maid-servant; they whose cause He had so 
often pleaded, and whose emancipation He had prepared. 
It was the people who cried, " Crucify Him, crucify Him !" 

This will become intelligible to us if we can get at the 
spirit of this passage. 

Among those who heard Him lay down the laws of the 
kingdom of God — justice, fairness, charity — there was one 
who had been defrauded, as it seems, by his brother of his 
just share of the patrimony. He thought that the One who 
stood before him was exactly what he wanted : a redresser 
of wrongs — a champion of the oppressed — a divider and ar- 
biter between factions — a referee of lawsuits — one who 
would spend His life in the unerring decision of all misun- 
derstandings. 

To his astonishment, the Son of Man refused to interfere in 
his quarrel, or take part in it at all. " Man, who made me a 
judge or a divider between you ?" 

We ask attention to two things. 

I. The Saviour's refusal to interfere. 
II. The source to which He traced the appeal for interfer- 
ence. 

I. The Saviour's refusal to interfere. 

1. He implied that it was not His joar^ to interfere. " Who 
made me a judge or a divider?" 

It is a common saying that religion has nothing to do with 
politics, and particularly there is a strong feeling current 
against all interference with politics by the ministers of re- 
ligion. This notion rests on a basis which is partly wrong, 
partly right. 

To say tliat religion has nothing to do with politics is to 



Christ's yudgment Respecting Inheritance. 201 

assert that which is simply false. It were as wise to say 
that the atmosphere has nothing to do with the principles of 
architecture. Directly, nothing — indirectly, much. Some 
kinds of stone are so friable, that though they will last for 
centuries in a dry climate, they will crumble away in a few 
years in a damp one. There are some temperatures in which 
a form of building is indispensable which in another would 
be unbearable. The shape of doors, windows, apartments, 
all depend upon the air that is to be admitted or excluded. 
Nay, it is for the very sake of procuring a habitable atmos- 
phere within certain limits that architecture exists at all. 
The atmospheric laws are distinct from the laws of architect- 
ure ; but there is not an architectural question into which 
atmospheric considerations do not enter as conditions of the 
question. 

That which the air is to architecture, religion is to politics. 
It is the vital air of every question. Directly, it determines 
nothing — indirectly,, it conditions every problem that can 
arise. The kingdoms of this world must become the king- 
doms of our Lord and of His Christ. How, if His Spirit is 
not to mingle with political and social truths ? 

Nevertheless, in the popular idea that roligion as such 
must not be mixed with politics, there is a profound truth. 
Here, for instance, the Saviour will not meddle with the 
question. He stands aloof, sublime and dignified. It was 
no part of His to take from the oppressor and give to the 
oppressed, much less to encourage the oppressed to take 
from the oppressor himself It was His part to forbid op- 
pression. It was a judge's part to decide what oppression was. 
It was not His office to determine the boundaries of civil 
right, nor to lay down the rules of the descent of property. 
Of course there was a spiritual and moral principle involved 
in this question. But He would not suffer His sublime mis- 
sion to degenerate into the mere task of deciding casuistry. 

He asserted principles of love, unselfishness, order, which 
would decide all questions ; but the questions themselves 
He would not decide. He would lay down the great politic- 
al principle, " Render unto Caesar the things that be Caesar's, 
and unto God the things which are God's;" but He would 
not determine whether this particular tax was due to Caesar 
or not. 

So, too. He would say, justice, like mercy and truth, is one 
of the weightier matters of the law ; but he would not decide 
whether in this definite case this or that brother had justice 
on his side. It was for themselves to determine that, and in 
that determination lay their responsibility. 



202 Christ'' s yudgment Respecting Inheritance, 

And thus religion deals with men, not cases : with human 
hearts, not casuistry. 

Christianity determines general principles, out of which, 
no doubt, the best government would surely spring : but 
what the best government is it does not determine — whether 
monarchy or a republic, an aristocracy or a democracy. 

It lays down a great social law : " Masters, give unto your 
servants that which is just and equal." But it is not its part 
to declare how much is just and equal. It has no fixed 
scale of wages according to which masters must give. That 
it leaves to each master and each age of society. 

It binds up men in a holy brotherhood. But what are the 
best institutions and surest means for arriving at this broth- 
erhood it has not said. In particular, it has not pronounced 
whether competition or co-operation will secure it. 

And hence it comes to pass that Christianity is the eternal 
religion, which can never become obsolete. If it sets itself 
to determine the temporary and the local, the justice of this 
tax, or the exact wrongs of that conventional maxim, it 
would soon become obsolete : it would be the religion of one 
century, not of all. As it is, it commits itself to nothing ex- 
cept eternal principles. 

It is not sent into this world to establish monarchy, or se- 
cure the franchise — to establish socialism, or to frown it into 
annihilation — but to establish a charity, and a moderation, 
and a sense of duty, and a love of right, which will modify 
human life according to any circumstances that can possibly 
arise. 

2. In this refusal, again, it was implied that His kingdom 
was one founded on spiritual disposition, not one of outward 
law and jurisprudence. 

That this lawsuit should have been decided by the broth- 
ers themselves, in love, with mutual fairness, would have 
been much — that it should be determined by authoritative 
arbitration, was, spiritually speaking, nothing. The right 
disposition of their hearts, and the right division of their 
property thence resulting, was Christ's kingdom. The ap- 
portionment of their property by another's division had 
nothing to do with His kingdom. 

Suppose that both were wrong : one oppressive, the other 
covetous. Then, that the oppressor should become gener- 
ous, and the covetous liberal, were a great gain. But to 
take from one selfish brother in order to give to another self- 
ish brother, what spiritual gain would there have been in 
this ? 

Suppose, again, that the retainer of the inheritance was in 



Christ's yudgment Respecting Inherita7ice, 203 

the wrong, and that the petitioner had justice on his side — ■ 
that he was a humble, meek man, and his petition only one 
of right. Well, to take the property from the unjust and 
give it to Christ's servant, might be, and was, the duty of a 
judge; but it was not Christ's part, nor any gain to the 
cause of Christ. He does not reward His servants with in- 
heritances, with lands, houses, gold. The kingdom of God is 
not meat and drink, but righteousness, and peace, and joy in 
the Holy Ghost. Christ triumphs by wrongs meekly borne, 
even more than by wrongs legally righted. What we call 
poetical justice is not His kingdom. 

To apply this to the question of the day. The great prob- 
lem which lies before Europe for solution is, or will be, this : 
Whether the present possessors of the soil have an exclusive 
right to do what they will with their own, or whether a 
larger claim may be put in by the workman for a share of 
the profits ? Whether Capital has hitherto given to Labor 
its just part, or not ? Labor is at present making an appeal, 
like that of this petitioner, to the Church, to the Bible, to 
God. " Master, speak unto my brother, that he divide the 
inheritance with me." 

Now in the mere setting of that question to rest, Chris- 
tianity is not interested. That landlords should become 
more liberal, and employers more merciful : that tenants 
should be more honorable, and workmen more unselfish ; 
that would be indeed a glorious thing — a triumph of Christ's 
cause ; and any arrangement of the inheritance thence result- 
ing would be a real coming of the kingdom of God. But 
whether the soil of the country and its capital shall remain 
the property of the rich, or become more available for the 
poor, the rich and the poor remaining as selfish as before — 
whether the selfish rich shall be able to keep, or the selfish 
poor to take, is a matter, religiously speaking, of profound 
indifference. Which of the brothers shall have the inherit- 
ance, the monopolist or the covetous ? Either — neither — 
who cares ? Fifty years hence what will it matter ? But 
a hundred thousand years hence it will matter whether 
they settled the question by mutual generosity and forbear- 
ance. 

3. I remark a third thing. He refused to be the friend of 
one, because He was the friend of both. He never was the 
champion of a class, because He was the champion of hu- 
manity. We may take for granted that the petitioner was 
an injured man — one, at all events, who thought himself in- 
jured ; and Christ had often taught the spirit which would 
have made his brother right him, but He refused to take his 



204 Christ's yudgment Respectmg Inheritance. 

part against his brother, just because he was his brother-* 
Christ's servant, and one of God's family, as well as he. 

And this was His spirit always. The Pharisees thought 
to commit Him to a side when they asked whether it was 
lawful to give tribute to Caesar or not. But He would take 
no side as the Christ : neither the part of the Government 
against the tax-payers, nor the part of the tax-payers against 
the Government. 

Now it is a common thing to hear of the rights of man— 
a glorious and a true saying, but, as commonly used, the ex- 
pression only means the rights of a section or class of men. 
And it is very worthy of remark, that in these social quar- 
rels both sides appeal to Christ and to the Bible as the 
champions of their rights, precisely in the same way in 
which this man appealed to Him. One class appeal to the 
Bible, as if it were the great Arbiter which decrees that the 
poor shall be humble and the subject submissive ; and the 
other class appeal to the same book triumphantly, as if it 
were exclusively on their side, its peculiar blessedness con- 
sisting in this, that it commands the rich to divide the inher- 
itance, and the ruler to impose nothing that is unjust. 

In either of these cases Christianity is degraded, and the 
Bible misused. They are not, as they have been made, oh, 
shame ! for centuries, the servile defenders of rank and 
wealth, nor are they the pliant advocates of discontent and 
rebellion. The Bible takes neither the part of the poor 
against the rich exclusively, nor that of the rich against the 
poor ; and this because it proclaims a real, deep, true, and 
not a revolutionary brotherhood. 

The brotherhood of which we hear so much is often only a 
one-sided brotherhood. It demands that the I'ich shall treat 
the poor as brothers. It has a right to do so. It is a brave 
and a just demand ; but it forgets that the obligation is mu- 
tual ; that in spite of his many faults, the rich man is the 
poor man's brother, and that the poor man is bound to rec- 
ognize him and feel for him as a brother. 

It requires that every candid allowance shall be made for 
the vices of the poorer classes, in virtue of the circumstances 
which, so to speak, seem to make such vices inevitable : for 
their harlotry, their drunkenness, their uncleanness, their in- 
subordination. Let it enforce that demand ; it may and 
must do it in the name of Christ. He was mercifully and 
mournfully gentle to those who through terrible temptation 
and social injustice had sunk, and sunk into misery at least 
as much as into sin. But then, let it not be forgotten tiiax 
Fome sympathy must be also due on the san. e score of cu« 



Christ's yiidgmcnt Respecting Inheritance, 265 

cumstances to the rich man. "Wealth has its temptations, so 
has power. The vices of the rich are his forgetfulness of re- 
sponsibility, his indolence, his extravagance, his ignorance of 
wretchedness. These must be looked upon, no^ certainly 
with weak excuses, but Avith- a brother's eye by the poor 
man, if he will assert a brotherhood. It is not just to attrib- 
ute all to circumstances in the one case, and nothing in the 
other. It is not brotherhood to say that the laborer does 
wrong because he is tempted, and the man of wealth because 
he is intrinsically bad. 

II. The source to which he traced this appeal for a di 
vision. 

Now it is almost certain that the reflection which aros 
to the lips of Christ is not the one which would have pre- 
sented itself to us under similar circumstances. We should 
probably have sneered at the state of the law in which a 
lawsuit could obtain no prompt decision, and injury get no 
redress : or we should have remarked upon the evils of the 
system of primogeniture, and asked whether it were just 
that one brother should have all, and the others none : or 
we might, perhaps, have denounced the injustice of permit' 
ting privileged classes at all. 

He did nothing of this kind. He did not sneer at the law, 
nor inveigh against the system, nor denounce the privileged 
classes. He went deeper : to the very root of the matter. 
"Take heed and beware of covetousness." It was covet- 
ousness which caused the unjust brother to withhold : it 
was covetousness which made the defrauded brother indig- 
nantly complain to a stranger. It is covetousness which is 
at the bottom of all lawsuits, all social grievances, all polit- 
ical factions. So St. James traces the genealogy. "From 
whence come wars and fightings among you ? Come they 
not hence, even from your lusts which reign in your flesh ?" 

Covetousness — the covetousness of all : of the oppressed 
as well as of the oppressor ; for the cry " Divide " has its 
root in covetousness just as truly as " I will not." There 
are no innocent classes : no devils who. oppress, and angels 
who are oppressed. The guilt of a false social state must 
be equally divided. 

"We will consider somewhat more deeply this covetousness. 
In the original the word is a very expressive one. It means 
the desire of having more — not of having more because 
there is not enough, but simply a craving after more. More 
when a man has not enough. More when he has. More, 
more, ever more. Give, give. Divide, divide. 



2o6 Christ's yudgment Respecting Inheritance, 

This craving is not universal. Individuals and whole 
nations are without it. There are some nations, the con- 
dition of whose further civilization is, that the desire of 
accumulation be increased. They are too indolent or too 
unambitious to be covetous. Energy is awakened when 
wants are immediate, pressing, present ; but ceases with the 
gratification. 

There are other nations in w^hich the craving is excessive, 
even to disease. Pre-eminent among these is England. This 
desire of accumulation is the source of all our greatness, and 
all our baseness. It is at once our glory and our shame. It 
is the cause of our commerce, of our navy, of our military 
triumphs, of our enormous wealth, and our marvellous inven- 
tions. And it is the cause of our factions and animosities, 
of our squalid pauperism, and the worse than heathen deg- 
radation of the masses of our population. 

That which makes this the more marvellous is, that of all 
the nations on the earth, none are so incapable of enjoyment 
as we. God has not given to us that delicate development 
which He has given to other races. Our sense of harmony 
is dull and rare, our perception of beauty is not keen. An 
English holiday is rude and boisterous : if protracted, it 
ends in ennui and self-dissatisfaction. We can not enjoy. 
Work, the law of human nature, is the very need of an Eng- 
lish nature. That cold shade of Puritanism which passed 
over us, sullenly eclipsing all grace and enjoyment, was but 
the shadow of our own melancholy, unenjoying, national 
character. 

And yet we go on accumulating as if we could enjoy more 
by having more. To quit the class in which they are and 
rise into that above, is the yearly, daily, hourly effort of 
millions in this land. And this were well if this word 
" above " implied a reality : if it meant higher intellectually, 
morally, or even physically. But the truth is, it is only 
higher fictitiously. The middle classes already have every 
real enjoyment which the wealthiest can have. The only 
thing they have not is the ostentation of the means of enjoy- 
ment. More would enable them to multiply equipages, 
houses, books. It could not enable them to enjoy them more. 

Thus, then, we have reached the root of the matter. Our 
national craving is, in the proper meaning of the term, cov- 
etousness. Not the desire of enjoying more, but the desire 
of having more. And if there be a country, a society, a 
people to whom this warning is specially applicable, that 
country is England, that society our own, that people are 
we. "Take heed and beware of covetousness." 



Chris fs yudgment Respecting Inheritance. 207 

The true remedy for this covetousness He then proceeds 
to give. "A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of 
the things which he possesseth." 

Now observe the distinction between His view and the 
world's view of humanity. To the question, What is a man 
worth ? the world replies by enumerating what he has. In 
reply to" the same question, the Son of Man replies by esti- 
mating what he is. Not what he has, but what he is, that^ 
through time and through eternity, is his real and proper 
life. He declared the presence of the soul : He announced 
the dignity of the spiritual man ; He revealed the being that 
we are. Not that which is supported by meat and drink, 
but that whose very life is in truth, integrity, honor, purity. 
" Skin for skin " was the satanic version of this matter ; " All 
that a man hath will he give for his life^ " What shall it 
profit a man," was the Saviour's announcement, " if he shall 
gain the whole world and lose his own soulf'' 

For the oppressed and the defrauded this was the true 
consolation and compensation — the true consolation. Thig 
man had lost so much loss. Well, how is he consoled ? By 
the thought of retaliation — by the promise of revenge — by 
the assurance that he shall have what he ought by right to 
have? Nay, but thus — as it were: Thou hast lost so much, 
but thyself remains. " A man's life consisteth not in the 
abundance of the things which he possesseth." 

Most assuredly Christianity proclaims laws which will 
eventually give to each man his rights. I do not deny this. 
But I say that the hope of these rights is not the message, 
nor the promise, nor the consolation of Christianity. Rather 
they consist in the assertion of the true life, instead of all 
other hopes : of the substitution of blessedness which is in- 
ward character, for happiness which is outAvard satisfaction 
of desire ; for the broken-hearted, the peace which the world 
can not give ; for the poor, the life which destitution can not 
take away ; for the persecuted, the thought that they are the 
children of their Father which is in heaven. 

A very striking instance of this is found in the consolation 
offered by St. Paul to slaves. How did he reconcile them to 
their lot? By promising that Christianity would produce 
the abolition of the slave-trade ? No ; though this was to be 
effected by Christianity : but by assuring them that, though 
slaves, they might be inly free — Christ's freedmen. "Art 
thou called, being a slave ? Care not for it." 

This, too, was the real compensation offered by Christiani- 
ty for injuries. 

The other brother had the inheritance \ and to win the in' 



2o8 Christ's yudgment Respecting Inheritable e, 

heritance he had laid upon his soul the guilt of injustice 
His advantage was the property : the price he paid for that 
advantage was a hard heart. The injured brother had no 
inheritance^ but instead he had, or might have had, innocence, 
and the conscious joy of knowing that he was not the injurer. 
Herein lay the balance. 

Now there is great inconsistency between the complaints 
and claims that are commonly made on these subjects. 
There are outcries against the insolence of power and the 
hard-hearted selfishness of wealth. Only too often these cries 
have a foundation of justice. But be it remembered that 
these a.e precisely the cost at which the advantages, such as 
they are, are purchased. The price which the man in au- 
thority has paid for power is the temptation to be insolent. 
He has yielded to the temptation, and bought his advantage 
dear. The price which the rich man pays for his wealth is 
the temptation to be selfish. They have paid in spirituals for 
what they have gained in temporals. 

Now, if you are crying for a share in that wealth, and a 
participatioii in that power, you must be content to run the 
risk of becoming as hard and selfish and overbearing as the 
man whom you denounce. Blame their sins if you will, or 
despise their advantages ; but do not think that you can 
covet their advantages, and keep clear of their temptations. 
God is on the side of the poor, and the persecuted, and the 
mourners — a light in darkness, and a life in death ; but the 
poverty, and the persecution, and the darkness are the con- 
dition on which they feel God's presence. They must not 
expect to have the enjoyment of wealth and the spiritual 
blessings annexed to poverty at the same time. 

If you will be rich, you must be content to pay the price 
of falling into temptation, and a snare, and many foolish and 
hurtful lusts, which drown men in perdition ; and if that 
price be too high to pay, then you must be content with the 
quiet valleys of existence, where alone it is well with us : 
kept out of the inheritance, but having instead God for your 
portion — your all-sufficient and everlasting portion — peace, 
and quietness, and rest with Christ. 



Freedom by the Truth. 203 



XIX. 
FREEDOM BY THE TRUTH. 

**And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you frea**"— 
John viii. 32. 

If these words were the only record we possessed of the 
Saviour's teaching, it may be that they would be insufficient 
to prove His personal Deity, but they would be enough to 
demonstrate the Divine character of His mission. 

Observe the greatness of the aim, and the wisdom of the 
means. 

The aim was to make all men free. He saw around Him 
servitude in every form — man in slavery to man, and race to 
race: His own countrymen in bondage to the Romans — ■ 
slaves both of Jewish and Roman masters, frightfully op- 
pressed : men trembling before priestcraft : and those who 
were politically and ecclesiastically free, in worse bondage 
still — the rich and rulers slaves to their own passions. 

Conscious of His inward Deity and of His Father's inten-^ 
tions, He, without hurry, without the excitement which 
would mark the mere earthly liberator, calmly said, " Ye 
shall be free." 

See, next, the peculiar wisdom of the means. 

The craving for liberty was not new — it lies deep in human 
nature. Nor was the promise of satisfying it new. Em- 
pirics, charlatans, demagogues, and men who were not char- 
latans nor demagogues, had promised in vain. 

1. First, they had tried by force. Wherever force has 
been used on the side of freedom, we honor it ; the names 
which we pronounce in boyhood with enthusiasm are those 
of the liberators of nations and the vindicators of liberty. 
Israel had had such : Joshua — the Judges — Judas Macca- 
baeus. Had the Son of God willed so to come, even on hu- 
man data the success was certain. I waive the truth of His 
inward Deity, of His miraculous power, of His power to sum- 
mon to His will more than twelve legions of angels. I only 
notice now that men's hearts were full of Him : ripe for re- 
volt : and that at a single word of His, thrice three hundred 
thousand swords would have started from their scabbards. 
But had He so come, one nation might have gained liberty— 



2 1 o Freedom by the Truths 

not the race of man : moreover, the liberty would only have 
been independence of a foreign conqueror. Therefore as a 
conquering king He did not come. 

2. Again, it might have been attempted by legislative en- 
actment. Perhaps only once has this been done successfully, 
and by a single effort. When the names of conquerors shall 
have been forgotten, and modern civilization shall have be- 
come obsolete — when England's shall be ancient history, one 
act of hers will be remembered as a record of her greatness, 
that Act by which in costly sacrifice she emancipated her 
slaves. 

But one thing England could not do. She could give free- 
dom — she could not fit for freedom — she could not make it 
lasting. The stroke of a monarch's pen will do the one, the 
discipline of ages is needed for the other. Give to-morrow a 
constitution to some feeble Eastern nation, or a horde of sav- 
ages, and in half a century they will be subjected again. 
Therefore the Son of Man did not come to free the world by 
legislation. 

3. It might be done by civilization. Civilization does free 
— intellect equalizes. Every step of civilization is a victory 
over some lower instinct. But civilization contains within 
itself the elements of a fresh servitude. Man conquers the 
powers of nature, and becomes in turn their slave. The 
workman is in bondage to the machinery which does his 
will : his hours, his wages, his personal habits determined by 
it. The rich man fills his house with luxuries, and can not do 
without them. A highly civilized community is a very 
spectacle of servitude. Man is there a slave to dress, to 
hours, to manners, to conventions, to etiquette. Things con- 
trived to make his life more easy become his masters. 

Therefore Jesus did not talk of the progress of the species 
nor the growth of civilization, He did not trust the world's 
hope of liberty to a right division of property. But he freed 
the inner man, that so the outer might become free too. 
" Ye shall know the truth, and the ti-uth shall make yop 
free." 

I. The truth that liberates. 
n. The liberty which truth gives. 

The truth which Christ taught was chiefly on these three 
points : God — man — immortality. 

First, God. Blot out the thought of God, a living person, 
and life becomes mean, existence unmeaning, the universe 
dark, and resolve is left without a stay, aspiration and duty 
without a sujiport. 



Freedom by the Truth, 211 

The Son exhibited God as love : and so that fearful bond* 
age of the mind to the necessity of fate was broken. A liv- 
ing Lord had made the world, and its dark and unintelligible 
mystery meant good, not evil. He manifested Him as a 
Spirit ; and if so, the only worship that could please Him 
must be a spirit's worship. Not by sacrifices is God pleased, 
nor by droned litanies and liturgies, nor by fawning and flat- 
tery, nor is his wrath bought off by blood. Thus was the 
chain of superstition rent asunder ; for superstition is wrong 
views of God, exaggerated or inadequate, and wrong concep- 
tions of the way to please Him. 

And so when the woman of Samaria brought the conver- 
sation to that old ecclesiastical question about consecrated 
buildings, whether on Mount Gerizim or on Mount Moriah 
God was the more acceptably adored. He cut the whole 
conversation short by the enunciation of a single truth: 
" God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship 
Him in spirit and in truth." 

2. Truth respecting man. 

We are a mystery to ourselves. Go to any place where 
nations have brought together their wealth and their inven- 
tions, and before the victories of mind you stand in rever- 
ence. Then stop to look at the passing crowds who have 
attained that civilization. Think of their low aims, their 
mean lives, their conformation only a little higher than that 
of brute creatures, and a painful sense of degradation steals 
upon you. So great, and yet so mean ! And so of individu- 
als. There is not one here whose feelings have not been 
deeper than we can fathom, nor one who would venture to 
tell out to his brother man the mean, base thoughts that have 
crossed his heart during the last hour. Now this riddle He 
solved — ^He looked on man as fallen, but magnificent in his 
ruin. We, catching that thought from Him, speak as He 
spoke. But none that were born of woman ever felt this or 
lived this like Him. Beneath the vilest outside He saw this : 
a human soul, capable of endless growth; and thence He 
treated with what for want of a better term we may call 
respect, all who approached Him ; not because they were 
titled Rabbis or rich Pharisees, but because they were men. 

Here was a germ for freedom. It is not the shackle on 
the wrist that constitutes the slave, but the /oss of self-re- 
spect — to be treated as degraded till he feels degraded — to 
be subjected to the lash till he believes that he deserves the 
lash : and liberty is to suspect and yet reverence self — to 
suspect the tendency which leaves us ever on the brink of 
fall — to reverence that within up, which is allied to God. re« 



2 12 Freedom by the Truth, 

deemed by God the Son, and made a temple of the Holy 
Ghost. 

Perhaps we have seen an insect or reptile imprisoned in 
wood or stone. How it got there is unknown — how the 
particles of wood in years, or of stone in ages, grew round 
it, is a mystery, but not a greater mystery than the question 
of how man became incarcerated in evil. At last the day of 
emancipation came. The axe-stroke was given: and the 
light came in, and the warmth; and the gauze wings ex- 
panded, and the eye looked bright ; and the living thing 
stepped forth, and you saw that there was not its home. Its 
home was the free air of heaven. 

Christ taught that truth of the human soul. It is not in 
its right place. It never is in its right place in the dark 
prison-house of sin. Its home is freedom and the breath of 
God's life. 

3. Truth respecting immortality. 

He taught that this life is not all : that it is only a miser- 
able state of human infancy. He taught that in words : by 
His life, and by His resurrection. 

This, again, was freedom. If there be a faith that cramps? 
and enslaves the soul, it is the idea that this life is all. If 
there be one that expands and elevates, it is the thought of 
immortality : and this, observe, is something quite distinct 
from the selfish desire of happiness. It is not to enjoy, but 
to 5e, that we long for. To enter into more and higher life : 
a craving which we can only part with when we suik below 
humanity, and forfeit it. 

This was the martyrs' strength. They were tortured, not 
accepting deliverance, that they might attain a better resur- 
rection. In that hope, and the knowledge of that truth, they 
were free from the fear of pain and death. 

II. The nature of the liberty which truth gives. 

1. Political freedom. 

It Avas our Avork last Sunday to show that Christianity 
does not directly interfere with political questions. But we 
should have only half done our work if we had not also 
learned that, mediately and indirectly, it must influence 
them. Christ's Gospel did not promise political freedom, yet 
it gave it : more surely than conqueror, reformer, or patriot, 
that Gospel will bring about a true liberty at last. 

And this, not by theories nor by schemes of constitutions, 
but by the revelation of truths. God a Spirit : man His 
child, redeemed and sanctified. Before that spiritual equali- 
ty, all distinctions between peer and peasant, monarch and 



Freedom by the Truth, 2 1 3 

laborer, privileged and unprivileged, vanish. A better man, 
or a wiser man than I, is in my presence, and I feel it a mock- 
ery to be reminded that I am his superior in rank. 

Let us hold that truth ; let us never weary of proclaiming 
it ; and the truth shall make us free at last. 

2. Mental independence. 

Slavery is that which cramps powers. The worst slavery 
is that which cramps the noblest powers. Worse, therefore, 
than he who manacles the hands and feet, is he who puts 
fetters on the mind, and pretends to demand that men shall 
think, and believe, and feel thus and thus, because others so 
believed, and thought, and felt before. 

In Judea life was become a set of forms, and religion a 
congeries of traditions. One living word from the lips of 
Christ, and the mind of the world was free. 

Later, a mountain mass of superstition had gathered 
round the Church, atom by atom, and grain by grain. Men 
said that the soul was saved only by doing and believing 
what the priesthood taught. Then the heroes of the Refor- 
mation spoke. They said the soul of man is saved by the 
grace of God : a much more credible hypothesis. Once 
more the mind of the world was made free, and made free 
by truth. 

There is a tendency in the masses always to think — not 
what is true, but — what is respectable, correct, orthodox : 
we ask, is that authorized ? It comes partly from cowardice, 
partly from indolence, from habit, from imitation, from the 
uncertainty and darkness of all moral truths, and the dread 
of timid minds to plunge into the investigation of them. 
Kow, truth known and believed respecting God and man 
frees from this, by warning of individual responsibility. 
But responsibility is personal. It- can not be delegated to 
another, and thrown off upon a church. Before God, face 
to face, each soul must stand to give account. 

Do not, however, confound mental independence with men- 
tal pride. It may, it ought to coexist with the deepest hu- 
mility. For that mind alone is free which, conscious ever 
of its own feebleness, feeling hourly its own liability to err, 
turning thankfully to light from whatever side it may come, 
does yet refuse to give up that right with which God has in- 
vested it of judging, or to abrogate its own responsibility, 
and so humbly, and even awfully, resolves to have an opin- 
ion, a judgment, a decision of itsown. 

3. Superiority to temptation. 

It is not enough to define the liberty which Christ prom- 
ises as freedom from sin. Many circumstances will exempt 



214 Freedom by the Truth. 

from sin which do not yet confer that liberty "where the 
Spirit of the Lord is." Childhood, paralysis, ill health, the 
impotence of old age may remove the capacity and even the 
desire of transgression ; but the child, the paralytic, the old 
man, are not free through the truth. 

Therefore, to this definition we must add, that one whom 
Christ liberates is free by his own will. It is not that he 
would and can not ; but that he can, and will not. Christian 
liberty is right will, sustained by love, and made firm by 
faith in Christ. 

This may be seen by considering the opposite of liberty — 
moral bondage. Go to the intemperate man in the morn- 
ing, when his head aches, his hand trembles, his throat burns, 
and his whole frame is relaxed and unstrung : he is ashamed, 
he hates his sin, and would not do it. Go to him at night, 
when the power of habit is on him like a spell, and he obeys 
the mastery of his craving. He can use the language of 
Romans vii. : " That which he would, he does not ; but the 
evil that he hates, that does he." Observe, he is not in pos- 
session of a true self It is not he, but sin which dwelleth in 
him, that does it. A power which is not himself, which is not 
he, commands him against himself And that is slavery. 

This is a gross case, but in every more refined instance the 
slavery is just as real. Wherever a man would and can not, 
there is servitude. He may be unable to control his expend- 
iture, to rouse his indolence, to check his imagination. 
Well, he is not free. He may boast, as the Jews did, that 
he is Abraham's son, or any other great man's son — that he 
belongs to a free country — that he never was in bondage to 
any man, but free in the freedom of the Son he is not. 

4. Superiority to fear. 

Fear enslaves, courage liberates — and that always. What- 
ever a man intensely dreads, that brings him into bondage, 
if it be above the fear of God and the reverence of duty. 
The apprehension of pain, the fear of death, the dread of the 
world's laugh, of poverty, or the loss of reputation, enslave 
alike. 

From such fear Christ frees, and through the power of 
the truths I have spoken of He who lives in the habitual 
contemplation of immortality can not be in bondage to time, 
or enslaved by transitory temptations. I do not say he izill 
not ; " he can not sin," saith the Scripture, while that faith is 
iiving. He who feels his soul's dignity, knowing what he is 
and who, redeemed by God the Son, and freed by God the 
Spirit, can not cringe, nor pollute himself, nor bo mean. He 
who aspires to gaze undazzled on the intolerable brightness 



Freedom by the Truth. 215 

of that One before whom Israel veiled their faces, will 
scarcely quail before any earthly fear. 

This is not picture-painting. This is not declamation. 
These are things that have been. There have been men on 
this earth of God's, of whom it was simply true that it was 
easier to turn the sun from its course than them from the 
paths of honor. There have been men like John the Baptist, 
who could speak the truth which had made their own spirits 
free, with the axe above their neck. There have been men, 
redeemed in their inmost being by Christ, on whom tyrants 
and mobs have done their worst, and when, like Stephen, the 
stones crashed in upon their brain, or when their flesh hissed 
and crackled m the flames, were calmly superior to it all. 
The power of evil had laid its shackles on the flesh, but the 
mind, and the soul, and the heart were free. 

We conclude with two inferences : 

1. To cultivate the love of truth. I do not mean veracity : 
that is another thing. Veracity is the correspondence be- 
tween a proposition and a man's belief. Truth is the corre- 
spondence of the proposition with fact. The love of truth is 
the love of realities — the determination to rest upon facts, 
and not upon semblances. Take an illustration of the way 
in which the habit of cultivating truth is got. Tw^o boys see 
a misshapen, hideous object in the dark. One goes up to the 
cause of his terror, examines it, learns what it is ; he knows 
the truth, and the truth has made him free. The other leaves 
it in mystery and unexplained vagueness, and is a slave for 
life to superstitious and indefinite terrors. Romance, pretti- 
ness, " dim religious light," awe and mystery — these are not 
the atmosphere of Christ's gospel of liberty. Base the heart 
on facts. The truth alone can make you free. 

2. See what a Christian is. Our society is divided into 
two classes — those who are daring, inquisitive, but restrain- 
ed by no reverence, and kept back by little religion ; those 
who may be called religious : but, with all their excellences, 
we can not help feeling that the elements of their character 
are feminine rather than masculine, and that they have no 
grasp or manly breadth, that their hold is on feeling rather 
than on truth. 

Now see w^hat a Christian is, drawn by the hand of Christ. 
He is a man on whose clear and open brow God has set the 
stamp of truth: one whose very eye beams bright with hon- 
or; in whose very look and bearing you may see freedom, 
manliness, veracity ; a brave man — a noble man — frank, gen- 
erous, true, with, it may be, many faults; whose freedom 
may take the form of impetuosity or rashness, but the form 



2 1 6 The Kingdom of the Truth, 

of meanness never. Young men, if you have been deterred 
from religion by its apparent feebleness and narrowness, re- 
member, it is a manly thing to be a Christian. 



XX. 
THE KINGDOM OF THE TRUTH. 

"Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then ? Jesus answered, 
Thou say est that I am a king. To this end was I bom, and for this cause 
came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one 
that is of the t) uth heareth my voice." — John xviii. 37. 

The Church is the kingdom of God on earth, and the whole 
fabric of the Christian religion rests on the monarchy of 
Christ. The Hebrew prisoner who stood before the Roman 
judge claimed to be the King of men, and eighteen centuries 
have only verified His claim. There is not a man bearing 
the Christian name who does not, in one form or another, ac- 
knowledge Him to be the Sovereign of his soul. The ques- 
tion therefore at once suggests itself — On what title does this 
claim rest ? 

Besides the title on which the Messiah grounded His pre- 
tensions to be the Ruler of a kingdom, three are conceivable : 
the title of force, the title of prescriptive authority, or the ti- 
tle of incontrovertible reasoning. 

Had the Messiah founded His kingdom upon the basis of 
force, he would simply have been a rival of the Caesars. The 
imperial power of Rome rested on that j^rinciple. This was all 
that Pilate meant at first by the question, "Art thou a king ?" 
As a Roman, he had no other conception of rule. Right 
well had Rome fulfilled her mission as the iron kingdom 
which was to command by strength, and give to the w^orld 
the principles of law. But that kingdom was wasting when 
these words were spoken. For seven hundred years had the 
empire been building itself up. It gave way at last, and was 
crumbled into fragments by its own ponderous massiveness. 
To use the language of the prophet Daniel, miry clay had mix- 
ed with the kingdom of iron, and the softer nations which had 
been absorbed into it broke down its once invincible strength 
by corrupting and enervating its citizens ; the conquerors of 
the world dropped the sword from a grasp grown nerveless. 
The empire of strength was passing away ; for no kingdom 
founded on force is destined to permanence. "They that 
take the sword shall perish with the sword." 



The Kingdom of the Truth. 2 1 7 

Before Pontius Pilate Christ distinctly disclaimed this right 
of force as the foundation of his sovereignty. " If my king- 
dom were of this world, then would my servants fight : but 
now is my kingdom not from hence." 

The next conceivable basis of a universal kingdom is pre- 
scriptive authority. The scribes and priests who waited out- 
side for rheir victim conceived of such a kingdom. They 
had indeed already an ecclesiastical kingdom which dated 
back far beyond the origin of Rome. They claimed to rule 
on a title such as this : " It is written." But neither on this 
title did the Saviour found His claim. He spoke lightly of 
institutions which were venerable from age. He contravened 
opinions which were gray with the hoar of ages. It may be 
that at times He defended Himself on the authority of Moses, 
by showing that what He taught was not in opposition to 
Moses ; but it is observable that He never rested His claims 
as a teacher, or as the Messiah, on that foundation. The 
scribes fell back on this : " It has been said ;" or, " It is writ- 
ten." Christ taught, as the men of His day remarked, on an 
authority very different from that of the scribes. Not even 
on His own authority : He did not claim that His words 
should be recognized because He said them, but because they 
were true. " If I say the truth, why do ye not believe me ?" 
Prescription — personal authority — these were not the basis 
of His kingdom. 

One more possible title remains. He might have claimed 
to rule over men on the ground of incontrovertible demon- 
stration of His principles. This was the ground taken by ev- 
ery philosopher who was the founder of a sect. Apparently, 
after the failure of his first guess, Pilate thought in the sec- 
ond surmise that this was what Jesus meant by calling Him- 
self a king. When he heard of a kingdom, he thought he 
had before him a rival of Caesar ; but when truth was named, 
he seems to have fancied that he was called to try a rival of 
the philosophers — some new candidate for a system — some 
new pretender of a truth which was to dethrone its rival sys- 
tem. 

This seems to be implied in the bitter question, " What is 
truth?" For the history of opinion in those days was like 
the history of opinion in our own — religions against religions, 
philosophies against philosophies — religion and philosophy 
opposed to one another — the opinion of to-day dethroned by 
the opinion of to-morrow — the heterodoxy of this age reckon- 
ed the orthodoxy of the succeeding one. And Pilate, feeling 
the vainness and the presumption of these pretensions, having 
lived to see failure after failure of systems which pretended to 



2 1 8 The Kingdom of the Truth, 

teach that which is, smiled bitterly at the enthusiast who 
again asserted confidently His claims to have discovered the 
undiscoverable. There broke from his lips a bitter, half-sar- 
castic, half-sad exclamation of hopeless skepticism, " What is 
truth ?" 

And indeed had the Redeemer claimed this — to overthrow 
the doctrine of the Porch and of the Academy, and to en- 
throne Christianity as a philosophy of life upon their ruins, 
by mere argument, that skeptical cry would have been not 
ill-timed. 

In these three ways have men attempted the propagation 
of the Gospel. By force, when the Church ruled by persecu- 
tion — by prescriptive authority, when she claimed infallibili- 
ty, or any modification of infallibility in the Popery of Rome 
or the Popery of the pulpit — by reasoning, in the age of 
" evidences," when she only asked to have her proofs brought 
forward and calmly heard, pledged herself to rule the world 
by the conviction of the understanding, and laid deep and 
broad the foundations of rationalism. Let us hear the claim 
of the King Himself. He rested His royal rights on His tes- 
timony to the truth. " Thou sayest, for I am a King (a more 
correct translation) ; to this end was I born, to bear witness 
to the truth." The mode in which the subjects of the king- 
dom were brought beneath His sway was by assimilation. 
" Every one that is of the truth, heareth My voice." These, 
then, are our points : 

I. The basis of the kingly rule of Christ. 
H. The qualifications of the subjects of the kingdom. 

I. The basis of the kingly rule of Christ. 

Christ is a king in virtue of His being a witness to the 
truth. " Thou sayest right. To this end was I born, and for 
this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness 
unto the truth." 

Truth is used here in a sense equivalent to reality: for 
"truth" substitute reality, and it will become more intelligi- 
ble. For " the truth " is an ambiguous expression, limited in 
•its application, meaning often nothing more than a theologi- 
cal creed, or a few dogmas of a creed which this or that par- 
ty have agreed to call " the truth." It would indeed fritter 
down the majesty of the Redeemer's life to say that He was 
ix witness for the truth of any number of theological dogmas. 
Himself — His life — were a witness to truth in the sense of re- 
ality. The realities of life — the realities of the universe — to 
these His every act and word bore testimony. He was as 
much a witness to the truth of the purity of domestic life aa 



The Kingdom of the Truth, 2 1 9 

to the truth of the doctrine of the Incarnation : to the truth 
of goodness being identical with greatness as much as to the 
doctrine of the Trinity — and more : His mind corresponded 
with reality as the dial with the sun. 

Again, in being a witness to reality, we are to understand 
something very much deeper than the statement that He 
spoke truly. There is a wide difference between truthfulness 
and mere veracity. Veracity implies a correspondence be- 
tween words and thoughts : truthfulness, a correspondence 
between thoughts and realities. To be veracious, it is only 
necessary that a man give utterance to his convictions; to be 
true, it is needful that his convictions have affinity with fact. 

Let us take some illustrations of this distinction. The 
prophet tells of men who put sweet for bitter, and bitter for 
sweet : who call good evil, and evil good. Yet these were 
veracious men ; for to them evil loas good, and bitter was 
sweet. There was a correspondence between their opinions 
and their words : this was veracity. But there was no cor- 
respondence between their opinions and eternal fact : this 
was untruthfulness. They spoke their opinions truly, but 
their opinions were not true. The Pharisees in the time of 
Christ were men of veracity. What they thought they said. 
They thought that Christ was an impostor. They believed 
that to tithe mint, anise, and cummin was as acceptable to 
God as to be just, and merciful, and true. It was their con. 
viction that they were immeasurably better than publicans 
and profligates : yet veracious as they were, the title perpet- 
ually affixed to them is, " Ye hypocrites." The life they led 
being a false life, is called, in the phraseology of the Apostle 
John, a lie. 

If a man speak a careless slander against another, believ- 
ing it, he has not sinned against veracity ; but the careless- 
ness which has led him into so grave an error effectually 
bars his claim to clear truthfulness. He is a veracious wit- 
ness, but not a true one. Or a man may have taken up sec- 
ond-hand, indolently, religious views : may believe them, de- 
fend them A^ehemently, is he a man of truth ? Has he bowed 
before the majesty of truth with that patient, reverential 
humbleness which is the mark of those who love her ? 

Imagination has pictured to itself a domain in which every 
one who enters should be compelled to speak only what he 
thought, and pleased itself by calling such domain the pal- 
ace of truth. A palace of veracity, if you will, but no tem- 
ple of the truth : a place where every one would be at liberty 
to utter his own crude unrealities — to bring forth his delu- 
sions* mistakes, half-formed hasty judgments : where the de« 



2 20 The Kmgdom of the Truth. 

praved ear would reckon discord harmony, and the depraved 
eye mistake color — the depraved moral taste take Herod or 
Tiberius for a king, and shout beneath the Redeemer's Cross. 
"Himself He can not save." A temple of the truth ? Nay, 
only a palace echoing with veracious falsehoods : a Babel 
of confused sounds, in which egotism would rival egotism, 
and truth would be each man's own lie. Far, far more is 
implied here than that the Son of Man spoke veraciously, ia 
saying that He was a witness to the truth. 

Again, when it is said that He was a witness to the truth, 
it is implied that His very being, here, manifested to the 
world Divine realities. Human nature is but meant to be a 
witness to the Divine ; the true humanity is a manifestation 
or reflection of God. And that is Divine humanity in 
which the humanity is a perfect representation of the Divine. 
" We behold," says the Apostle Paul, in Christ, " as in a 
glass, the glory of the Lord." And, to borrow and carry on 
the metaphor, the difference between Christ and other men 
is this ; they are imperfect reflections, He a perfect one, of 
God. 

There are mirrors which are concave, which magnify the 
thing that they reflect : there are mirrors convex, which di- 
minish it. And we in like manner represent the Divine in a 
false, distorted way. Fragments of truth torn out of connec- 
tion, snatches of harmony joined without unity. We exag- 
gerate and diminish till all becomes untrue. We bring forth 
our own fancies, our own idiosyncrasies, our own imagina- 
tions, and the image of God can be no longer recognized. 

In One alone has the Divine been so blended with the 
liuman, that, as the ocean mirrors every star and every tint 
of blue upon the sky, so was the earthly life of Christ the 
life of God on earth. 

Now, observe, that the perfection of humanity consists in 
faithful imitation of, or witness borne to, the mind and life of 
God. Whoever has studied and understood the life of Christ 
will have remarked, not without surprise, that the whole 
principle of His existence was the habit of unceasing imita- 
tion. Listen to a few instances of this. 

" The Son can do nothing of Himself, but that which He 
geeth the Father do." " The words which I speak I speak 
not of myself, but the Father which is with me, He doeth 
the works." Do we remember the strange and startling 
principle on which He defends His infraction of the literal, 
legal Sabbath ? " My Father worketh liitherto, and I work." 
God the Father works all the sabbath-day. So may man, 
His son. Do we recollect the ground on which He enfoicea 



The Kingdom of the Truth, 2 2 1 

forgiveness of injuries ? A strange ground, surely, which 
would never have occurred except to One whose life was 
habitual imitation. " Love your enemies ; do good to them 
that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you 
and persecute you : that ye may be the children of (that is, 
resemble) your Father ; . . . for He sendeth His rain upon the 
just and upon the unjust." 

This, then, is man's — this was the Son of Man's relation to 
the truth. Man is but a learner — a devout recipient of a 
revelation — here to listen with open ear devoutly for that 
which he shall hear; to gaze and watch for that which He 
shall see. Man can do no more. He can not create truth, 
he can only bear witness to it ; he has no proud right of 
private judgment, he can only listen and report that which 
is in the universe. If he does not repeat and witness to 
that, he speaketh of his own, and forthwith ceaseth to be 
true. He is a liar, and the father of it, because he creates it. 
Each man in his vocation is in the world to do this : as 
truly as it was said by Christ may it be said by each of us, 
even by those from whose trades and professions it seems 
most alien, " To this end was I born, and for this cause 
came I into the world, to bear witness to the truth." 

The architect is here to be a witness. He succeeds only 
so far as he is a witness, and a true one. ■ The lines and 
curves, the acanthus on his column, the proportions, all are 
successful and beautiful only so far as they are true — the 
report of an eye which has lain open to God's world. If he 
build his light-house to resist the storm, the law of imitation 
bids him build it after the shape of the spreading oak which 
has defied the tempest. If man construct the ship which is 
to cleave the waters, calculation or imitation builds it on the 
model upon which the Eternal Wisdom has already con- 
structed the fish's form. 

The artist is a witness to the truth, or he will never attain 
the beautiful. So is the agriculturist, or he will never reap 
a harvest. So is the statesman, building up a nation's polity 
on the principles which time has proved true, or else all his 
work crumbles down in revolution : for national revolution 
is only the Divine rejection stamped on the social falsehood 
— which can not stand. In every department of life, man 
must work truly — as a witness. He is born for that, noth- 
ing else : and nothing else can he do. Man the Son can do 
nothing; of Himself, but that which He seeth God the Father 
do. 

This was the Saviour's title to be a king, and His king- 
dom formed itself upon this law : " Every one that is of the 



2 2 2 The Kingdom of the Truth, 

truth heareth my voice :" that eternal law which makes 
truth assimilate all that is congenial to itself. Truth is like 
life : whatever lives absorbs into itself all that is congenial. 
The leaf that trembles in the wind assimilates the light of 
heaven to make its color, and the sap of the parent stem, 
innumerable influences from heaven, and earth, and air, to 
make up its beautiful being. 

So grew the Church of Christ — round Him, as a centre, 
attracted by the truth : all that had in it harmony with His 
Divine life and words grew to Him (by gradual accretions) : 
clung to Him as the iron to the magnet. All that were of 
His Spirit believed : all that had in them the Spirit of Sacri^ 
fice were attracted to His Cross. " I, if I be lifted up, will 
draw all men unto me." 

He taught not by elaborate trains of argument, like a 
scribe or a philosopher : He uttered His truths rather as 
detached intuitions, recognized by intuition, to be judged 
only by being felt. For instance, " Blessed are the pure in 
heart : for they shall see God." " It is more blessed to give 
than to receive." " Blessed are ye when men shall revile 
you, and persecute you." Prove that — by force — by au- 
thority — by argument — you can not. It suffices that a man 
reply, " It is not so to me : it is more blessed to receive than 
it is to give." You have no reply : if he be not of the 
truth, you can not make him hear Christ's voice. The truth 
of Christ is true to the unselfish ; a falsehood to the selfish. 
They that are of the truth, like Him, hear His voice : and if 
you ask the Christian's proof of the truth of such things, he 
has no other than this : It is true to me, as any other intui- 
tive truth is true ; equals are equal, because my mind is so 
constituted that they seem so perforce. Purity is good, be- 
cause my heart is so made that it feels it to be good. 

Brother men, the truer you are, the humbler, the nobler, 
the more will you feel Christ to be your king. You may be 
very little able to prove the king's Divine genealogy, or to 
appreciate those claims to your allegiance which arise out 
of His eternal generation : but He will be your Sovereign 
and your Lord by that affinity of character which compels 
you to acknowledge His words and life to be Divine. " He 
that receiveth His testimony hath set to his seal that God is 
true." 

II. We pass to the consideration of the qualification of the 
subjects of the empire of the truth. Who are they that are 
of the truth. 

1. The first qualification is to he true : " He tliat is of thu 



The Kingdom of the Truth, 223 

truth heareth My voice." Truth lies in character. Christ 
did not simply speak truth : He was truth : true through 
and through ; for truth is a thing, not of words, but of life 
and being. None but a Spirit can be true. 

For example. The friends of Job spoke words of truth. 
Scarcely a maxim which they uttered could be impugned: 
cold, hard, theological verities : but verities out of place, in 
that place cruel and untrue. Job spoke many words not 
strictly accurate — hasty, impetuous, blundering, wrong ; but 
the whirlwind came, and, before the voice of God, the vera- 
cious falsehoods were swept into endless nothingness : the 
tnie man, wrong, perplexed in verbal error, stood firm : he 
was true though his sentences were not : turned to the truth 
as the sunflower to the sun : as the darkened plant impris- 
oned in the vault turns towards the light, struggling to 
solve the fearful enigma of his existence. Job was a servant 
of the truth, being true in character. 

2. The next qualification is integrity. But by integrity I 
do not mean simply sincerity or honesty; integrity rather 
accordinsj to the meaningr of the word as its derivation inter- 
prets it — entireness — wholeness — soundness : that which 
Christ means when He says, "If thine eye be single [or 
sound], thy whole body shall be full of light." 

This integrity extends through the entireness or whole- 
ness of the character. It is found in small matters as well 
as great ; for the allegiance of the soul to truth is tested by 
small things rather than by those which are more important. 
There is many a man who would lose his life rather than 
perjure himself in a court of justice, whose life is yet a tis- 
sue of small insincerities. We think that we hate falsehood 
when we are only hating the consequences of falsehood. 
We resent hypocrisy and treachery and calumny, not be- 
cause they are untrue, but because they harm us. We hate 
the false calumny, but we are half pleased with the false 
praise. It is evidently not the element of untruth here that 
is displeasing, but the element of harmfulness. Now he is a 
man of integrity who hates untruth as untruth : who resents 
the smooth and polished falsehood of society which does no 
harm : who turns in indignation from the glittering whiten 
ed lie of sepulchral Pharisaism which injures no one. Integ- 
rity recoils from deceptions which men would almost smile 
to hear called deception. To a moral, pure mind, the arti- 
fices in every department of life are painful : the stained 
wood which passes for a more firm and costly material in a 
building, and deceives the eye by seeming what it is not, 
marble : the painting which is intended to be taken for a r& 



224 The Kingdom of the Truth, 

ality : the gilding which is meant to pass for gold : and the 
glass which is worn to look like jewels ; for there is a moral 
feeling and a truthfulness in architecture, in painting, and in 
dress, as well as in the market-place, and in the senate, and 
in the judgment-hall. 

" These are trifles." Yes, these are trifles — but it is just 
these trifles which go to the formation of character. He 
that is habituated to deceptions and artificialities in trifles, 
will try in vain to be true in matters of importance : foi 
truth is a thing of habit rather than of will. You can not in 
any given case, by any sudden and single efibrt, will to be 
true, if the habit of your life has been insincerity. And it ia 
a fearful question and a difiicult one, how all these things, 
the atmosphere which we breathe of our daily life, may sap 
the very foundations of the power of becoming a servant of 
the truth. Life becomes fictitious : and it passes into religion, 
till our very religion bases itself upon a figment too. We 
are not righteous, but we expect God to make believe that 
we are righteous, in virtue of some peculiar doctrines which 
we hold; and so our very righteousness becomes the ficti' 
tious righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, instead of 
the righteousness which is by faith, the righteousness of 
those w^ho are the children of the kingdom of the truth. 

3. Once more. He alone is qualified to be the subject of 
the King who does the truth. Christianity joins two things 
inseparably together: acting truly, and perceiving truly. 
Every day the eternal nature of that principle becomes 
more certain. If any man will do His will, he shall know of 
the doctrine whether it be of God. 

It is a perilous thing to separate feeling from acting ; to 
have learnt to feel rightly without acting rightly. It is a 
danger to which in a refined and polished age, we are pecul- 
iarly exposed. The romance, the poem, and the sermon, 
teach us how to feel. Our feelings are delicately correct. 
But the danger is this : feeling is given to lead to action ; 
if feeling be sufiered to awake without passing into duty, 
the character becomes untrue. When the emergency for 
real action comes, the feeling is as usual produced : but ac- 
customed as it is to rise in fictitious circumstances without 
action, neither will it lead on to action in the real ones. 
" We pity wretchedness and shun the wretched." We utter 
sentiments, just, honorable, refined, lofty — but somehow, 
when a truth presents itself in the shape of a duty, we are 
unable to perform it. And so such characters become by 
degrees like the artificial pleasure-grounds of bad taste, in 
which the waterfall does not fall, and the grotto ofiera only 



The Kingdom of the Truth. 225 

the refreshment of an imaginary shade, and the green hill 
does not strike the skies, and the tree does not grow. Their 
lives are a sugared crust of sweetness trembling over black 
depths of hollo wness : more truly still, " w^hited sepulchres ' 
— fair without to look upon, " withm full of all lincleanness." 

It is perilous, again, to separate thinking rightly from act- 
ing rightly. He is already half false who speculates on truth 
and does not do it. Truth is given, not to be contemplated, 
but to be done. Life is an action — not a thought. And the 
penalty paid by him who speculates on truth, is that by de- 
grees the very truth he holds becomes to him a falsehood. 

There is no truthfulness, therefore, except in the witness 
borne to God by doing His will^to live the truths we hold, 
or else they w^ill be no truths at all It was thus that He 
witnessed to the truth. He lived it. He spoke no touching 
truths for sentiment to dwell on, or thought to speculate upon. 
Truth with Him was a matter of life and death. He periled 
His life upon the words He said. If He were true, the life 
of men was a painted life, and the woes He denounced un- 
flinchingly would fall upon the Pharisees. But if they were 
true, or even strong, His portion in this life was the Cross. 

Who is a true man ? He who does the truth ; and never 
holds a principle on which he is not prepared in any hour to 
act, and in any hour to risk the consequences of holdmg it. 

I make in conclusion one remark. The kingly character 
of truth is exhibited strikingly in the calmness of the bearing 
of the Son of Man before His judge. Veracity is not neces- 
sarily dignified. There is a vulgar effrontery — a spirit of 
defiance which taunts, and braves, and challenges condemna« 
tion. It marks the man who is conscious of sincerity, but of 
nothing higher — whose confidence is in himself and his own 
honesty, and who is absorbed in the feeling, " I speak the 
truth and am a martyr." Again, the man of mere veracity 
is often violent, for what he says rests upon his own asser- 
tion : and vehemence of assertion is the only addition he can 
make to it. Such was the violence of Paul before Ananias. 
He was indignant at the injustice of being smitten contrary 
to the law ; and the powerlessness of his position, the hope- 
lessness of redress, joined to a conviction of the truth of what 
he said, produced that vehemence. 

It has been often remarked that there is a great difference 
between theological and scientific controversy. Theologians 
are proverbially vituperative : because it is a question of ve- 
racity: the truth of their views, their moral perceptions, 
their intellectual acumen. There exists no test but argu- 
ment on which they can fall back. If argument fails, all fails. 



2 26 The Skepticism of Pilate, 

But the man of science stands calmly on the facts of the uni 
verse. He is based upon reality. Ail the opposition and 
controversy in the world can not alter facts, nor prevent the 
facts being manifest at last. He can be calm, because he is 
a witness for the Truth. 

In the same way, but in a sense far deeper and more sa- 
cred, the Son of Man stood calm^ rooted in the Truth. There 
"vas none of the egotism of self-conscious veracity in those 
placid, confident, dignified replies. This was not the feeling 
— "I hold the truth," — but "1 am witness to the truth." 
They might spit upon Him — kill Him — crucify Him — give 
His ashes to the winds — they could not alter the Truth by 
which He stood. Was not that His own feeling ? " Heaven 
and earth shall pass away, but My word shall not pass 
away." 

There was the kingly dignity of One who, in life and 
death, stood firm on truth as on a rock. 

In the name of Christ, I respectfully commend these 
thoughts for the special consideration of the present week, 
to those who will be pledged by oath to witness to the 
whole truth they know, and nothing but the truth : to those 
who — permitted by the merciful spirit of English jurispru- 
dence, to watch that their client, if condemned, shall be con- 
demned only according to the law — are yet not justified by 
the spirit of the life of Christ in falsifying or obscuring facts; 
and who, owing a high duty to a client, ow^e one higher to 
the Truth : and lastly, to those whom the severe intellectual, 
and, much more, moral training of the English bar has quali- 
fied for the high office of disentangling truth from the mazes 
of conflicting testimony. 

From the trial-hour of Christ — from the Cross of the Son 
of God — there arises the principle to which all His life bore 
witness, that the first lesson of Christian life is this. Be true 
•—and the second this". Be true — and the third this, Be true. 



XXI. 
THE SKEPTICISM OF PILATE. 

"Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?" — John xviii. 38. 

The lesson which we are to draw from this verse must 
depend upon the view we take of the spirit in which the 
words were spoken. Some of the best commentators con- 



The Skepticism of Pilate. 227 

ceive them to have been words of mockery : and such is the 
great Lord Bacon's view. " ' What is truth ?' said jesting 
Pilate, and would not wait for a reply." 

In all deference to such authority, we can not believe that 
this sentence was spoken in jest. In Pilate's whole conduct 
there is no trace of such a tone. It betrays throughout 
much of uncertainty, nothing of lightness. He was cruelly 
tormented with the perplexity of efforts to save his prisoner. 
He risked his own reputation. He pronounced Him, almost 
with vehemence, to be innocent. He even felt awe, and was 
afraid of Him. In such a frame of mind, mockery was im- 
possible. 

Let us try to comprehend the character of the man who 
asked this question. His character will help us to judge the 
tone in which he asked. And his character, the character of 
his mind and life, are clear enough from the few things re- 
corded of him. He first hears what the people have to say; 
then asks the opinion of the priests — then comes back to Je- 
sus — goes again to the priests and people — lends his ear — 
listens to the ferocity on the one hand, and feels the beau- 
ty on the other, balancing between them; and then he be- 
comes bewildered, as a man of the world is apt to do who 
has had no groundwork of religious education, and hears su- 
perficial discussions on religious matters, and superficial 
charges, and superficial slanders, till he knows not what to 
think. What could come out of such procedure ? Nothing 
but that cheerlessness of soul to which certainty respecting 
any thing and every thing here on earth seems unattainable. 
This is the exact niental state which we call skepticism. 

Out of that mood, when he heard the enthusiast before him 
speak of a kingdom of the truth, there broke a sad, bitter, 
sarcastic sigh, "What is truth?" Who knows any thing 
about it ? Another discoverer of the undiscoverable ! Jest- 
ing Pilate ! with Pilate the matter was beyond a jest. It 
was not a question put for the sake of information : for he 
went immediately out, and did not stay for information. It 
was not put for the sake of ridicule, for he went out to say, 
"I find no fault in Him." Sarcasm there was perhaps: -but 
it was that mournful, bitter sarcasm which hides inward un- 
rest in sneering words : that sad irony whose very laugh 
rings of inward wretchedness. We shall pursue, from this 
question of Pilate, two lines of thought. 

I. The causes of Pilate's skepticism. 
II. The way appointed for discovering what is truth. 

L The causes— and among these I name first, indecision of 



2 28 The Skepticism of Pilate, 

character. Pilate's whole behavior was a melancholy exhl 
bition. He was a thing set up for the world's pity. See how 
he acts : he first throws the blame on the priests — and then 
acknowledges that all responsibility is his own : washes his 
hands before the multitude, saying, " I am innocent of the 
blood of this just person. See ye to it." And then — " Know- 
est thou not that Zhave power to crucify thee, and power to 
release thee ?" He pronounces Jesus innocent ; and then, with 
wondrous inconsistency, delivers Him to be scourged : yields 
Him up to be crucified, and then tries every underhand ex- 
pedient to save Him. 

What is there in all this but vacillation of character lying 
at the root of unsettledness of opinion ? Here is a man 
knowing the right and doing the wrong — not willing to do 
an act of manifest injustice if he can avoid it, but hesitating 
to prevent it, for fear of a charge against himself — pitiably 
vacillating because his hands were tied by the consciousness 
of past guilt and personal danger. How could such a man 
be certain about any thing ? What could a mind, wavering, 
unstable, like a feather on the wind, know or believe of solid, 
stable truth, which altereth not, but remaineth like a rock 
amidst the vicissitudes of the ages and the changeful fash- 
ions of the minds of men ? "A double-minded man is un- 
stable in all his ways." " He that is of the truth, heareth 
the voice of truth." To the untrue man all things are untrue. 
To the vacillating man, who can not know his own mind, all 
things seem alterable, changeful, unfixed ; just as to the man 
tossed at sea, all things motionless in themselves seem to 
move round, upward, downward, or around, according to his 
own movements. 

2d. Falseness to his own convictions. 

Pilate had a conviction that Jesus was innocent. Instead 
of acting at once on that, he went and parleyed. He argued 
and debated till the practical force of the conviction was un- 
settled. 

Now let us distinguish : I do not say that a man is never 
to re-examine a question once settled. A great Christian 
writer, whose works are very popular, has advised that when 
a view has once been arrived at as true, it should be, as it 
were, laid on the shelf, and never again looked on as an open 
question : but surely this is false. A young man of twenty- 
three, with such ligiit as he has, forms his views: is he never 
to have more light? Is he never to open again the questions 
which his immature mind has decided on once ? Is he never 
in manhood, with manhood's data and manhood's experience, 
to modify, or even reverse, what once seemed the very truth 



The Skepticism of Pilate, 229 

itself? Nay, my brethren — the weak pride of consistency, 
the cowardice which dares not say I have been wrong all my 
life, the false anxiety which is fostered to be true to our prin- 
ciples rather than to make sure that our principles are true, 
all this would leave in Romanism the man who is born a Ro- 
manist. It is not so: the best and bravest have struggled 
from error into truth : they listened to their honest doubts, 
and tore up their old beliefs by the very roots. 

Distinguish, however. A man may unsettle the verdict of 
his intellect : it is at his peril that he tampers with the con- 
victions of his conscience. Every opinion and view must re- 
main an open question, freely to be tried with fresh light. 
But there are eternal truths of right and wrong, such as the 
plain moralities and instinctive decencies of social life, upon 
which it is perilous to argue. There are plain cases of im- 
mediate duty where it is only safe to act at once. 

Now Pilate was false to his conscience. His conviction was 
that Jesus was innocent. It was not a matter of speculation 
or probability at all, nor a matter in which fresh evidence 
was even expected, but a case sifted and examined thorough- 
ly. The Pharisees are persecuting a guiltless man. His 
claims to royalty are not the civil crime which they would 
make out. Every charge has fallen to the ground. The 
clear mind of the Roman procurator saw that, as in sunlight, 
and he did not try to invalidate that judicial conviction. He 
tried to get rid of the clear duty which resulted from it. 
Now it is a habit such as this which creates the temper of 
skepticism. 

I address men of a speculative turn of mind. There is 
boundless danger in all inquiry which is merely curious. 
When a man brings a clear and practised intellect to try 
questions, by the answer to which he does not mean to rule 
his conduct, let him not marvel if he feels, as life goes on, a 
sense of desolation ; existence a burden, and all uncertain. 
It is the law of his human nature which binds him ; for truth 
is for the heart rather than the intellect. If it is not done it 
becomes unreal — as gloomily unreal and as dreamily impal- 
pable as it was to Pilate. 

3d. The third cause of Pilate's skepticism was the taint of 
the worldly temper of his day. Pilate had been a public 
man. He knew life : had mixed much with the world's busi- 
ness, and the world's politics : had come across a multiplicity 
of opinions, and gained a smattering of them all. He knew 
how many philosophies and religions pretended to an exclu- 
sive possession of truth, and how the pretensions of each were 
overthrown by another. And his incredulity was but a spec* 



230 The Skepticism of Pilate, 

imen of the skepticism fashionable in his day. The polished 
skepticism of a polished, educated Roman, a sagacious man 
of the world, too much behind the scenes of public life to 
trust professions of goodness or disinterestedness, or to be- 
lieve in enthusiasm and a sublime life. And his merciful lan- 
guage, and his desire to save Jesus, was precisely the liberal- 
ism current in our days as in his — an utter disbelief in the 
truths of a world unseen, but at the same time an easy, care- 
less toleration, a half-benevolent, half-indolent unwillingness 
to molest the poor dreamers who chose to believe in such su- 
perstitions. 

This is the superficial liberalism which is contracted in 
public life. Public men contract a rapid way of discussing 
and dismissing the deepest questions — never going deep — 
satisfied with the brilliant flippancy which treats religious 
beliefs as phases of human delusion, seeing the hollowness of 
the characters around them, and believing that all is hollow ; 
and yet not without their moments of superstition, as when 
Pilate was afraid, hearing of a Son of God, and connecting ijt 
doubtless with the heathen tales of gods who had walked 
this earth in visible flesh and blood which he had laughed at, 
and which he now for one moment suspected might be true ; 
not without their moments of horrible insecuritj^ when the 
question, " What is truth ?" is not a brilliant sarcasm, but a 
sarcasm on themselves, on human life, on human nature, 
wrung out of the loneliest and darkest bewilderment that can. 
agonize a human soul. 

To such a character Jesus would not explain His truth. 
He gave no reply : He held His peace. God's truth is too 
sacred to be expounded to superficial worldliness in its tran- 
sient fit of earnestness. 

4th. Lastly, I assign, as a cause of skepticism, that priestly 
bigotry which forbids inquiry and makes doubt a crime. 

The priests of that day had much to answer for. Consider 
for a moment the state of things. One — of whom they only 
knew that He was a man of unblemished life — came forward 
to proclaim the truth. But it was new; they had never 
heard such views before; they were quite sure they had never 
taught such, nor sanctioned such ; and so they settled that 
the thing was heresy. He had no accredited ordination. 
"We know that God spake to Moses: as for this fellow we 
know not whence He is." Then they proceeded to bind that 
decision upon others. A man was heard to say, " Why, what 
evil hath he done?" Small oflfense enough, but it savored 
of a dangerous candor towards a suspected man ; and in the 
priestly estimate, candor is the next step to heresy. " Thou 



The Skepticism of Pilate. 231 

wast altogether born in sin, and dost Thou teach us ? and 
they cast him out of the synagogue." And so again with 
Pilate : they stifled his soul's rising convictions with threats 
and penalties — " If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's 
friend." 

This was what they were always doing : they forbade all 
inquiry, and made doubt of their decision a crime. 

Now the results of this priestcraft were twofold. The first 
result was seen in the fanaticism of the people who cried for 
blood : the second, in the skepticism of Pilate. And these 
are the two results which come from all claims to infallibility, 
and all prohibition of inquiry. They make bigots of the fee- 
ble-minded who can not think : cowardly bigots, who at the 
bidding of their priests or ministers swell the ferocious cry 
which forces a government, or a judge, or a bishop, to perse- 
cute some opinion which they fear and hate ; turning private 
opinion into civil crime : and they make skeptics of the acute 
intellects which, like Pilate, see through their fallacies, and 
like Pilate too, dare not publish their misgivings. 

And it matters not in what form that claim to infallibility 
is made : whether in the clear, consistent way in which Rome 
asserts it, or whether in the inconsistent way in which church- 
men make it for their church, or religious bodies for their 
favorite opinions: wherever penalties attach to a conscien- 
tious conviction, be they the penalties of the rack and flame, 
or the penalties of being suspected, and avoided, and slan- 
dered, and the slur of heresy affixed to the name, till all men 
count him dangerous lest they too should be put out of the 
synagogue ; and let every man who is engaged in persecuting 
any opinion ponder it — these two things must follow — you 
make fanatics, and you make skeptics ; believers you can not 
make. 

Therefore do we stand by the central protest and truth of 
Protestantism. There is infallibility nowhere on this earth : 
not in Rome ; not in councils or convocations ; not in the 
Church of England ; not in priests ; not in ourselves. The 
soul is thrown in the grandeur of a sublime solitariness on 
God. Woe to the spirit that stifles its convictions when 
priests threaten, and the mob which they have maddened 
cries heresy, and insinuates disloyalty — " Thou art not Cae- 
sar's friend." 

n. The mode appointed for discovering the reply to the 
question, " What is truth ?" 

Observe — I do not make our second division that which 
might seem the natural one — what truth is. I am not about 



232 The Skepticism of Pilate. 

to be guilty of the presumption of answering the question 
which Jesus did not answer. Some persons hearing the text 
might think it the duty of any man who took it as a text 
to preach upon, to lay down what truth is : and if a minister 
were so to treat it, he might give you the fragment of truth 
which his own poor mind could grasp : and he might call it, 
as the phrase is. The Truth, or The Gospel : and he might re- 
quire his hearers to receive it on peril of salvation. And 
then he would have done as the priests did; and they who 
lean on other minds would have gone away bigoted; and 
they who think would have smiled sadly, bitterly, or sarcas- 
tically, and gone home to doubt still more, " What is truth, 
and is it to be found ?" 

N'o, my brethren ! The truth can not be compressed into 
a sermon. The reply to Pilate's question can not be con- 
tained in any verbal form. Think you that if Christ Himself 
could have answered that question in a certain number of 
sentences. He would have spent thirty years of life in wit- 
nessing to it ? Some men would compress into the limits of 
one reply or one discourse the truth which it took Christ 
thirty years to teach, and which He left unfinished for the 
Spirit to complete. 

One word more. The truth is infinite as the firmament 
above you. In childhood, both seem near and measurable ; 
but with years they grow and grow, and seem farther off, 
and farther and grander, and deeper and vaster, as God Him- 
self; till you smile to remember how you thought you could 
touch the sky, and blush to recollect the proud and self-suf- 
ficient way in which you used to talk of knowing or preach- 
ing " the truth." 

And once again: the truth is made up of principles : an in- 
ward life, not any mere formula of words. God's character 
— spiritual worship— the Divine life in the soul. How shall 
I put that mto sentences ten or ten thousand ? " The words 
which I speak unto you, they are truth, and they are life?'' 
How could Pilate's question be answered except by a Life ? 
The truth, then, which Pilate wanted— which you want, and 
I want — is not the boundless verities, but truth of inward 
life. Truth for me : Truth enough to guide me in this dark- 
ling world • enough to teach meliow to live and liow to die. 

jSTow — the appointed ways to teach this Trnth. They are 
three : independence — humbleness — action. 

First, Independence. Let no man start as if independence 
savored of presumption. Protestant independence, they tell 
us, is pride and self-reliance, but in truth it is nothing more 
than a deep sense ol' personal re8j)onsibility ; a determination 



The Skepticism of Pilate. 233 

to trust in God rather than in man to teach : in God and 
God's light in the soul. You choose a guide among preci- 
pices and glaciers, but you walk for yourself; you judge his 
opinion, though more experienced than your own ; you over 
rule it if needs be ; you use your own strength, you rely on 
your own nerves. That is independence. 

You select your own physician, deciding upon the respect- 
ive claims of men, the most ignorant of whom knows more 
of the matter than you. You prudently hesitate at times to 
follow the advice of the one you trust most, yet that is only 
independence without a particle of presumption. 

And so precisely in matters of religious truth. No man 
cares for your health as you do ; therefore you rely blindly 
upon none. No man has the keeping of your own soul, or 
cares for it as you do. For yourself, therefore, you inquire 
and think, and you refuse to delegate that work to bishop, 
priest, or church. Call they that presumption? Oh, the 
man who knows the awful feeling of being alone, and strug- 
gling for truth as for life and death, he knows the difference 
between independence and presumption. 

Second, Humbleness. There is no infallibility in man ; if 
BO, none in us. We may err : that one thought is enough to 
keep a man humble. There are two kinds of temper contrary 
to this spirit. The first is a disputing, captious temper. 
Disagreement is refreshing when two men lovingly desire to 
compare their views to find out the truth. Controversy is 
wretched when it is an attempt to prove one another wrong. 
Therefore Christ would not argue with Pilate. Religious 
controversy does only harm. It destroys the humble inquiry 
after truth: it throws all the energies into an attempt to 
prove ourselves right. The next temper contrary is a hope- 
less spirit. Pilate's question breathed of hopelessness. He 
felt that Jesus was unjustly condemned, but he thought Him 
in views as hopelessly wrong as the rest: all were wrong. 
What was truth? Who knew any thing about it? He 
spoke too bitterly, too hopelessly, too disappointedly to get 
an answer. In that despairing spirit no man gets at truth : 
"J^e meek will He guide in judgment. . . ." 

Lastly, Action. This was Christ's rule — " If any man will 
do His will. ..." A blessed rule : a plain and simple rule. 
Here we are in a world of mystery, where all is difficult, and 
very much dark — where a hundred jarring creeds declare 
themselves to be the truth, and all are plausible. How shall 
a man decide ? Let him do the right that lies before him: 
much is uncertain — some things at least are clear. What- 
ever else may be wrong, it must be right to be pure---to be 



234 The Skepticism of Pilate. 

just and tender, and merciful and honest. It must be right 
to love, and to deny one's self. Let him do the will of God, 
and he shall know. Observe — men begin the other way. 
They say, If I could but believe, then I would make my life 
true : if I could but be sure what is truth, then I would set 
to work to live in earnest. No: God says. Act; make the 
life true, and then you will be able to believe. Live in ear- 
nest, and you will know the answer to " What is truth ?" 

Infer the blessedness of belief Young men are prone to 
consider skepticism a proof of strong-mindedness — a some- 
thing to be proud of Let Pilate be a specimen — and a 
wretched one he is. He had clear-mindedness enough. to be 
dissatisfied with all the views he knew : enough to see 
through and scorn the squabbles and superstitions of priests 
and bigots. All well, if from doubt of falsehood he had gone 
on to a belief in a higher truth. But doubt, when it left him 
doubting — why, he missed the noblest opportunity man ever 
had — that of saving the Saviour : he became a thing for the 
people to despise, and after ages to pity. And that is skep- 
ticism. Call you that a manly thing ? 

To believe is to be happy; to doubt is to be wretched. 
But I will not urge that. Seventy years — and the most fe- 
vered brain will be still enough. We will not say much of 
the wretchedness of doubt. To believe is to be strong. 
Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power. Only so far as a 
man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do 
any thing that is worth the doing. 

I speak to those who have learned to hold cheap the 
threats wherewith priests and people would terrify into ac- 
quiescence — to those who are beyond the appeal of fear, and 
can only yield, if at all, to higher motives. Young men, the 
only manly thing, the only strong thing, is faith. It is not 
so far as a man doubts, but so far as he believes, that he can 
achieve or perfect any thing. "All things are possible to 
hmi that believethj^'' 



The Israelites Grave, 235 



xxn. 
THE ISRAELITE'S GRAVE IN A FOREIGN LAND.* 

" And Joseph said unto his brethren, I die ; and God will surely visit you, 
and bring you out of this land unto the land which he sware to Abraham, to 
Isaac, and to Jacob. And Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, 
saying, Grod will surely visit you, and ye shall cany up my bones from hence. 
So Joseph died, being a hundred and ten years old : and they embalmed 
him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt." — Gen. 1. 24-26. 

There is a moment when a man's life is re-lived on earth. 
It is in that hour in which the coffin-lid is shut down, just 
before the funeral, when earth has seen the last of him for- 
ever. Then the whole life is, as it were, lived over again in 
the conversation which turns upon the memory of the de- 
parted. The history of threescore years and ten is soon re- 
capitulated : not, of course, the innumerable incidents and 
acta which they contained, but the central governing princi- 
ple of the whole. Feverish curiosity sometimes spends itself 
upon the last hours : and a few correct sentences, implying 
faith after the orthodox phraseology, would convey to some 
greater hope than a whole life breathing the Spirit of Christ 

* [ This sermon was formerly published by the Author in a separate form, 
and the following Preface to that publication explains so well the circumstances 
under which all the other sermons have been preserved, that it has been thought 
best to reprint the Preface here.^ 

"For the publication of the commonplace observations contained in the 
following pages, the commonplace excuse may, perhaps, suffice, that printing 
was the simplest Avay of multiplying copies for a few friends who desired 
them. Perhaps, too, the uncommonness of the occasion may justify the 
writer in giving to an ephemeral discourse an existence somewhat less tran- 
sient than the minutes spent in listening to it. 

' ' The sermon is published as nearly as possible as it was spoken. It was 
written out concisely for a friend on the day of its delivery, with no intention 
of publication. Afterwards, it seemed better to leave it in tliat state, with 
only a few corrections, and the addition of a few sentences, than to attempt 
to re-write it after an intei-val too great to recall what had been said. This 
will account for the abruptness and want of finish which pervades the com- 
position. 

"The writer takes this opportunity of disowning certain sermons which 
have been published in his name. They would not have been worth notice, 
had not the innumerable plunders of thought and expression which they 
contain been read and accepted by several as his. For this reason he feele 
it due to himself to state that they are published without his sanction, and 
against his request, and that he is not responsible for either the language oi 
the ideas. " 



236 The Israelite's Grave, 

separate from such sentences. But it is not thus the Bible 
speaks. It tells us very little of the closing scene, but a 
great deal of the general tenor of a life. In truth, the clos- 
ing scene is worth very little. The felon, who, up to the last 
fortnight, has shown his impenitence by the plea of not 
guilty, in the short compass of that fortnight makes a con- 
fession, as a matter of course exhibits the externals of peni- 
tence, and receives the Last Supper. But it would be cre- 
dulity, indeed, to be easily persuaded that the eternal state 
of such an one is affected by it. A life of holiness sometimes 
mysteriously terminates in darkness ; but it is not the bitter- 
est cries of forsakenness — so often the result of physical ex- 
haustion — nor even blank despair, that shall shake our deep 
conviction that he whose faith shone brightly through life is 
now safe in the everlasting arms. The dying scene is worth 
little — little^ at least, to us — except so far as it is in harmo- 
ny with the rest of life. 

It is for this reason that the public estimate pronounced 
upon the departed is generally a fair criterion of worth. 
There are, of course, exceptional cases — cases in which the 
sphere of action has been too limited for the fair development 
of the character, and nothing but the light of the judgment- 
day can reveal it in its true aspect — cases in which party 
spirit has defaced a name, and years are wanted to wash 
away the mask of false color which has concealed the genu- 
ine features — cases in which the champion of truth expires 
amidst the execrations of his contemporaries, and after ages 
build his sepulchre. These, however, are exceptions. For 
the most part, when all is over, general opinion is not far 
from truth. Misrepresentation and envy have no provoca- 
tives left them. What the departed was is tolerably well- 
known in the circle in Avhich he moved. The epitaph may 
be falsified by the partiality of relations ; but the broad judg- 
ment of society reverses that, rectifies it, and pronounces with 
perhaps a rude, but, on the whole, fair approximation to the 
truth. 

These remarks apply to the history of the man whose final 
scene is recorded in the text. The verdict of the Egyptian 
world was worth much. Joseph had gone to Egypt, some 
years before, a foreigner; had lived there in obscurity; had 
been exposed to calumny ; by his quiet, consistent goodness, 
had risen, step by step, first to respect, then to trust, com- 
mand, and veneration : was embalmedvifter death in the af- 
fections, as well as with the burial rights, of the Egyptians ; 
and his honored form reposed at last amidst the burial-place 
of the Pharaohs. 



The Israelite's Grave. 237 

In this respect the text branches into a twofold division. 
The life of Joseph, and the death which was in accordance 
with that life. 

1. The history of Joseph, as of every man, has two sides — 
its outward circumstances and its inner life. 

The outward circumstances were checkered with misfor- 
tune. Severed from his home in very early years, sold into 
slavery, cast into prison — at first grief seemed to have 
marked him for her own. And this is human life. Part of 
its lot is misery. There are two inadequate w^ays of ac- 
counting for this mystery of sorrow. One, originating in a 
zeal for God's justice, represents it as invariably the chastise 
ment of sin, or, at the least, as correction for fault. But, 
plainly, it is not always such. Joseph's griefs were the con- 
sequences, not of fault, but of rectitude. The integrity 
which, on some unknown occasion, made it his duty to carry 
his brethren's " evil report " to their father, was the occasion 
of his slavery. The purity of his life was the cause of his 
imprisonment. Fault is only a part of the history of this 
great matter of sorrow. Another theory, created by zeal for 
God's love, rep'esents sorrow as the exception, and happiness 
as the rule of life. We are made for enjoyment, it is said, 
and on the whole there is more enjoyment than wretched- 
ness. The common idea of love being that which identifies 
it with a simple wish to confer happiness, no wonder that a 
feeble attempt is made to vindicate God by a reduction of 
the apparent amount of pain. Unquestionably, however, 
love is very difierent from a desire to shield from pain. 
Eternal love gives to painlessness a very subordinate place 
in comparison of excellence of character. It does not hesi- 
tate to secure man's spiritual dignity at the expense of the 
sacrifice of his well-being. 

The solution will not do. Let us look the truth in the face. 
You can not hide it from yourself. " Man is born to sorrow 
as the sparks fly upward." Sorrow is not an accident, oc- 
curring now and then, it is the very woof which is woven 
into the warp of life. God has created the nerves to agonize, 
and the heart to bleed ; and before a man dies, almost every 
nerve has thrilled with pain, and every afiection has been 
wounded. The account of life which represents it as proba- 
tion is inadequate : so is that which regards it chiefly as a 
system of rewards and punishments. The truest account of 
this mysterious existence seems to be that it is intended for 
the development of the soul's life, for which sorrow is indis- 
pensable. Every son of man who would attain the true end 
of his being must be baptized with fire. It is the law of oui 



238 The Israelite's Grave, 

humanity, as that of Christ, that we must be perfected 
through suffering. And he who has not discerned the divine 
sacredness of sorrow, and the profound meaning which is con- 
cealed in pain, has yet to learn what life is. The Cross, man- 
ifested as the necessity of the highest life, alone interprets it. 

2. Besides this, obloquy was part of Joseph's portion. 
His brethren, even his father, counted him a vain dreamer, 
full of proud imaginings. He languished long in a dungeon 
with a stain upon his character. He was subjected to almost 
all the bitterness which changes the milk of kindly feelings 
into gall : to Potiphar's fickleness, to slander, to fraternal 
envy, to the ingratitude of friendship in the neglect of the 
chief butler, who left his prison and straightway forgot his 
benefactor. Out of all which a simple lesson arises, " Cease 
ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils." Yet that may 
be overstated. Nothing chills the heart like universal dis- 
trust. Nothing freezes the genial current of the soul so 
much as doubts of human nature. Human goodness is no 
dream. Surely we have met unselfishness, and love, and 
honor among men. Surely we have seen, and not in dreams, 
pure benevolence beaming from human countenances. Sure- 
ly we have met with integrity that the world's wealth could 
not bribe ; and attachment which might bear the test of any 
sacrifice. It is not so much the depravity as the frailty of 
men, that makes it impossible to count on them. Was it not 
excusable in Jacob, and even natural, if he attributed to van- 
ity his son's relation of the dream in v/hich the sun, and the 
moon, and the eleven stars bowed down before him ? Was 
it not excusable if Potiphar distrusted his tried servant's 
word, when his guilt appeared so indisputably substantiated? 
Was not even the chief butler's forgetfulness intelligible, 
when you remember his absorbing interest in his own dan- 
ger, and the multiplied duties of his office ? The world is 
not to be too severely blamed if it misrepresents us. It is 
hard to reach the truth — very hard to sift a slander. 

Men who believe Sucn rumors, especially in courtly life, 
may be ignorant, hasty, imperfect, but are not necessarily 
treacherous. Yet even while you keep this in mind, that the 
heart may not be soured, remember your dearest friend 
may fail you in the crisis: a truth of experience was 
wrapped up ir» the old fable, and the thing you have fostered 
in your boso?'^ may wound you to the quick ; the one you 
have trusted may become your accuser, and throw his own 
blame, with dastard meanness, upon you. That was the ex- 
perience of Joseph. Was not that His fate who trusted Ju- 
das ? There is One. and but One, whose love is as a rock, 



The Israelite's Grave, 239 

which will not fail you when you cling. It is a fearful, sol- 
itary feeling, that lonely truth of life ; yet not without a 
certain strength and grandeur in it. The life that is the 
deepest and the truest will feel most vividly both its desola- 
tion and its majesty. We live and die alone. God and our 
own souls — we fall back upon them at last. " Behold, the 
hour Cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, 
every man to his own, and shall leave Me alone ; and yet I 
am not alone, because the Father is with Me." 

3. Success, besides, marked the career of Joseph. Let us 
not take half views of men and things. The woof of life is 
dark ; that we granted : but it is shot through a web of 
brightness. Accordingly, in Joseph's case, even in his worst 
days, you find a kind of balance to be weighed against his 
sorrows. The doctrine of compensation is found through 
all. Amidst the schemings of his brothers' envy he had his 
father's love. In his slavery he had some recompense in 
feeling that he was gradually winning his master's confi- 
dence. In his dungeon he possessed the consciousness of in- 
nocence, and the grateful respect of his fellow-prisoners. 

In that beautiful hymn which some of you read last Sun-- 
day,* you may remember that a parallel is drawn between 
human life and the aspects of the weather. The morning 
rainbow, glittering among the dangerous vapors of the west, 
predicts that the day will not unclouded pass away. The 
evening rainbow declares that the storms are past, and that 
serene weather is setting in. Such is the life of all whom 
God disciplines. The morning or the evening brightness is 
the portion of a life, the rest of which is storm. Rarely are 
the manful struggles of principle in the first years of life suf- 
fered to be in vain. Joseph saw the early clouds which dark- 
ened the morning of his existence pass away, and the rain- 
bow of heavenly peace arched over the calmness of his later 
years. " The Lord was with Joseph, and he was a prosper- 
ous man." And it is for this special purpose it is written, 
"And Joseph saw Ephraim's children of the third genera- 
tion ; the children also of Machir, the son of Manasseh, were 
brought up on Joseph's knees." Long life, and honored old 
age, a quiet grave ; these were the blessings reckoned desir- 
able in Jewish modes of thought : and they are mentioned 
as evidences of Joseph's happiness. 

And this, too, is life. The sorrows of the past stand out 
most vividly in our recollections, because they are the keen- 
est of our sensations. At the end of a long existence we 

* Keble's Christian Year. Twenty-fifth Srnaay after Trinity. 



240 The Israelite s Grave. 

should probably describe it thus : " Few and evil have the 
days of the years of thy servant been." But the innumer- 
able infinitesimals of happiness that from moment to moment 
made life sweet and pleasant are forgotten ; and very richly 
has our Father mixed the materials of these with the home- 
liest actions and domesticities of existence. See two men 
meeting together in the streets — mere acquaintances. They 
will not be five minutes together before a smile will over- 
spread their countenances, or a merry laugh ring of, at the 
lowest, amusement. This has God done. God created the 
smile and the laugh, as well as the sigh and the tear. The 
aspect of this life is stern — very stern. It is a very supe^*- 
ficial account of it which slurs over its grave mystery, and 
refuses to hear its low, deep under-tone of anguish. But 
there is enough, from hour to hour, of bright, sunny happi- 
ness, to remind us that its Creator's highest name is love. 

Now turn to the spirit of Joseph's inner life. First of all, 
that life was forgiveness. You can not but have remarked 
that, conversant as his experience was with human treachery, 
no expressions of bitterness escape from him. No senti- 
mental wailing over the cruelty of relations, the falseness of 
friendship, or the ingratitude of the world ; no rancorous 
outburst of misanthropy ; no sarcastic skepticism of man's 
integrity or woman's honor. He meets all bravely, with 
calm, meek, and dignified forbearance. If ever man had 
cause for such doubts, he had ; yet his heart was never 
soured. At last, after his father's death, his brothers, appre- 
hending his resentful recollections of their early cruelty, 
come to deprecate his revenge. Very touching is his reply. 
" Fear not : for am I in the place of God ? But as for you, 
ye thought evil against me : but God meant it unto good, to 
bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. 
Now therefore, fear ye not : I will nourish you and your 
little ones." 

This is the Christian spirit before the Christian times. 
Christ was in Joseph's heart, though not definitely in Jo- 
seph's .creed. The Eternal Word whispered in the souls of 
men before it spoke articulately aloud in the Incarnation. 
It was the Divine Thought before it became the Divine Ex- 
pression.* It was the Light that lighteth every man that 
Cometh into the world, before it blazed into the Day-spring 
from on high which visited us. The mind of Christ, the 
spirit of the years yet future, blended itself with life before 
He came ; for His words were the eternal verities of our hu- 



The Israelite s Grave, 241 

manity. In all ages love is the truth of life. Men can not 
injure us except so far as they exasperate us to forget our- 
selves. No man is really dishonored except by his own act. 
Calumny, injustice, ingratitude — the only harm these can do 
us is by making us bitter, or rancorous, or gloomy : by shut- 
ting our hearts or souring our aifections. We rob them of 
their power if they only leave us more sweet and forgiving 
than before. And this is the only true victory. We win by 
love. Love transmutes all curses, and forces them to rain 
down in blessings. Out of the jealousy of his brothers Joseph 
extracted the spirit of forgiveness. Out of Potiphar's weak 
injustice, and out of the machinations of disappointed pas- 
sion, he created an opportunity of learning meekness. Our 
enemies become unconsciously our best friends when their 
slanders deepen in us heavenlier graces. Let them do their 
worst ; they only give us the Godlike victory of forgiving 
them. 

2. Distinguished from the outward circumstances, we find 
simplicity of character : partly in the willingness to acknowl- 
edge his shepherd-father in Egypt, where the pastoral life 
was an abomination ; partly in that incidental notice which 
V\^e have of the feast at which he entertained his brethren, 
where the Egyptians sat at a table by themselves, and Joseph 
by himself. So that, elevated as he was, his heart remained 
Hebrew still. He had contracted a splendid alliance by 
marrying into one of the noDiest families in Egypt, that of 
Potipherah, the priest of On. And yet he had not forgotten 
his country, nor sought to be naturalized there. His heart 
was in that far land where he had fed his father's flocks in 
his simple, genial boyhood ; the divining-cup of Egyptian 
silver was on his table ; but he remembered the days when 
the only splendor he knew was that coat of many colors 
which was made for him by his father. He bore a simple, 
unsophisticated heart amidst the pomp of an Egyptian court. 

There is a great mistake made on the subject of simplicity. 
There is one simplicity of circumstances, another simplicity 
of heart. These two must not be confounded. It is com- 
mon to talk of the humble poor man, and the proud rich 
man. Let not these ideas be inseparably blended together. 
There is many a man who sits down to a meal of bread and 
milk on a wooden table, whose heart is as proud as the proud- 
est whose birth is royal. There is many a one whose voice 
is heard in the public meeting, loudly descanting on legal 
tyranny and aristocratic insolence, who in his own narrow 
circle is as much a tyrant as any oppressor who ever dis- 
graced the throne. And there is many a man who sits down 



242 The Israelite s Grave, 

to daily pomp, to whom gold and silver are but as brass and 
tin, and who bears in the midst of it all a meek, simple spirit, 
and a " heart refrained as a weaned child :" many a man 
who lives surrounded with homage, and hearing the ap- 
plause and flattery of men perpetually, on whose heart these 
things fall flat and dead, without raising one single emotion 
of fluttered vanity. 

The world can not understand this. They can not believe 
that Joseph can be humble while he is conscious of such ele- 
vation above the crowd of men — not even dreaming of it. 
They can not understand how carelessly these outsides of 
life can be worn, and how they fall ofi" like the unregarded 
and habitual dress of daily life. They can not know how the 
spirit of the Cross can crucify the world, make grandeur 
painful, and calm the soul with a vision of the Eternal 
Beauty. They can not dream how His life and death, once 
felt as the grandest, write mockery on all else, and fill the 
soul with an ambition which is above the world. It is not 
the unje welled finger, nor the afiectation of an almost Qua- 
kerish simplicity of attire, nor the pedestrian mode of travel- 
ling, nor the scanty meal that constitute humility. It is that 
simple, inner life of real greatness, which is indifierent to 
magnificence, and surrounded by it all, lives far away in the 
distant country of a father's home, with the Cross borne si- 
lently and self-sacrificingly in the heart of hearts. 

3. One characteristic of Joseph's inner life remains — 
benevolence. It was manifested in the generosity with 
which he entertained his brethren, and in the discriminating 
tenderness with which he provided his best beloved brother's 
feast with extraordinary delicacies. These were traits of 
thoughtfulness. But further still. The prophetic insight 
of Joseph enabled him to foresee the approach of famine. 
He took measures accordingly ; and when the famine came, 
the royal storehouses were opened, and every man in Egypt 
owed his life to the benevolent providence of the Hebrew 
stranger. It was productive of a great social revolution. 
It brought, by degrees, all the land of Egypt into the power 
of the Crown, so that a kind of feudal system was establish- 
ed, every man holding in direct tenancy from the Crown. 
Hence the nation became compacted into a new unity, and 
power was concentrated in the hands of government, partly 
by the pecuniary revenue thus added, and partly by the 
lustre of goodness which Joseph had thrown round the royal 
acts. For acts like these are the real bulwarks of a throne. 
One such man as Joseph does more to strengthen the Crown 
than all the speculations, solemn or trifling, which were ever 



The Israelite s Grave, 243 

rritten on the " Divine right of kings." There is a right 
divine which requires no elaborate theory to make it felt. 

n. The death of Joseph was in accordance with his life. 

1. The funeral was a homage paid to goodness. Little is 
said in the text of Joseph's funeral. To know what it was, 
we must turn to the earlier part of the chapter, where that 
of Jacob is mentioned. A mourning of seventy days — a 
funeral whose imposing greatness astonished the Canaanites. 
They said, " This is a grievous mourning to the Egyptians.'* 
Seventy days were the time, or nearly so, fixed by custom 
for a royal funeral ; and Jacob was so honored, not for his 
own sake, but because he was Joseph's father. We can not 
suppose that Joseph's own obsequies were on a scale less 
grand. 

Now weigh what is implied in this. This was not the 
homage paid to talent, nor to wealth, nor to birth. Joseph 
was a foreign slave, raised to eminence by the simple power 
of goodness. Every man in Egypt felt, at his death, that he 
had lost a friend. There were thousands whose tears would 
fall when they recounted the preservation of lives dear to 
them in the years of famine, and felt that they owed those 
lives to Joseph. Grateful Egypt mourned the good Foreign- 
er ; and, for once, the honors of this world were given to the 
graces of another. 

2. We collect from this, besides, a hint of the resurrection 
of the body. The Egyptian mode of sepulture was embalm- 
ing ; and the Hebrews, too, attached much importance- to the 
body after death. Joseph commanded his countrymen to 
preserve his bones to take away with them. In this we de- 
tect that unmistakable human craving, not only for immor- 
tality, but immortality associated with a form. No doubt 
the Egyptian feeling was carried out absurdly. They tried 
to redeem from the worm the very aspect that had been 
worn, the very features they had loved ; and there was a 
kind of feeling, that while that mummy lasted, the man had 
not yet perished from earth. They expected that, in process 
of years, it would again be animated by its spirit. 

Now Christianity does not disappoint, but rather meets 
that feeling. It grants all that the materialist, and all that 
the spiritualist, have a right to ask. It grants to the mate- 
rialist, by the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, that 
future life shall be associated with a material form. Leaving 
untouched all the questions which may be raised about the 
identity of the atoms that have been buried, it simply pro- 
nounces that the spirit shall have a body. It grants to the 



^44 The Israelite s Grave. 

spiritualist all he ought to Avish — that the spirit shall be free 
from evil. For it is a mistake of ultra-spiritualism, to con- 
nect degradation with the thought of a risen body ; or to 
suppose that a mind, unbound by the limitations of space, is 
a more spiritual idea of resurrection than the other. 

The opposite to spirituality is not materialism, but sin. 
The form of matter does not degrade. For what is this 
world itself but the form of Deity, whereby the manifoldness 
of His mind and beauty manifests, and wherein it clothes 
itself? It is idle to say that spirit can exist apart from form. 
We do not know that it can. Perhaps even the Eternal Him- 
self is more closely bound to His works than our philosophi- 
cal systems have conceived. Perhaps matter is only a mode 
of thought. At all events, all that we know or can know of 
mind, exists in union with form. The resurrection of the 
body is the Christian verity, which meets and satisfies those 
cravings of the ancient Egyptian mind that expressed them- 
selves in the process of embalming, and the religious rev- 
erence felt for the very bones of the departed by the He- 
brews. 

Finally, in the last will and testament of Joseph we find 
faith. He commanded his brethren, and through them, his 
nation, to carry his bones with them when they migrated to 
Canaan. In the Epistle to the Hebrews that is reckoned an 
evidence of faith. "By faith Joseph gave commandment 
concerning his bones." How did he know that his people 
would ever quit Egypt ? We reply, by faith. Not faith in 
a written word, for Joseph had no Bible ; rather, faith in that 
conviction of his own heart which is itself the substantial evi- 
dence of faith. For religious faith ever dreams of something 
higher, more beautiful, more perfect, than the state of things 
with which it feels itself surrounded. Ever, a day future 
lies before it: the evidence for which is its own hope. 
Abraham, by that creative faith, saw the day of Christ, and 
was glad. Joseph saw his family in prosperity, even in af- 
fluence ; bnt he felt that this was not their rest. A higher 
life than that of afiiuence— a nobler destiny than that of 
stagnant rest, there must be for them in the future ; else all 
the anticipations of a purer earth, and a holier world, which 
imagination bodied forth within his soul, w^ere empty dreams, 
not the intuitions of God's Spirit. It was this idea of 
perfection, which was " the substance of things hoped for," 
that carried him far beyond the period of his own death, 
and made him feel himself a partaker of his nation's blessed 
future. 

And that is the evidence of immortality. When the 



The Israelite s Grave, 245 

coffin is lowered into the grave, and the dull, heavy sound of 
earth falling on it is heard, there are some to whom that 
sound seems but an echo of their worst anticipations ; seems 
but to reverberate the idea of decay forever, in the words, 
"Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust." There are 
others to whom it sounds pregnant with the expectations of 
immortality, the " sure and certain hope of a resurrection to 
eternal life." The difference between these two feelings is 
measured by the difference of lives. They whose life is low 
and earthly, how can they believe in aught beyond the grave, 
when nothing of that life which is eternal has yet stirred 
within them? They who have lived as Joseph lived, just in 
proportion to their purity and their unselfishness, must 
believe it. They can not but believe it. The eternal exist- 
ence is already pulsing in their veins ; the life of trust and 
high hope, and sublime longings after perfection, with which 
the decay of the frame has nothixig at all to do. That is 
gone — yes — but it was not that life in which they lived, and 
when it finished, what had that ruin to do with the destruc- 
tion of the immortal ? 

For what is our proof of immortality ? N'ot the analogies 
of nature — the resurrection of nature from a winter grave — 
or the emancipation of the butterfly. Not even the testi- 
mony to the fact of risen dead ; for who does not know how 
shadowy and unsubstantial these intellectual proofs become 
in unspiritual frames of mind ? No ; the life of the spirit is 
the evidence. Heaven begun is the living proof that makes 
the heaven to come credible. " Christ in you is the hope of 
glory." It is the eagle eye of faith which penetrates the 
grave, and sees far into the tranquil things of death. He 
alone can believe in immortality who feels the resurrection in 
him already. 

There is a special application to be made of this subject to 
our hearts. It is not often that the pulpit can be used for a 
funeral eulogium. Where Christ is to be exalted in solitary 
pre-eminence, it is but rarely that the praise of men may be 
heard. Rank, royalty itself, could not command from the 
lips of a minister of the King of kings one syllable of adula- 
tory, undeserved, or unfelt homage. But there are cases in 
which to loftiness of birth is added dignity of character; 
and then we gladly relax the rule, to pay a willing tribute 
to the majesty of goodness. 

There is one to whom your thoughts must have reverted 
often dunng the history which we have been going through, 
suggesting a parallel, all the more delicately felt from the 
absence of dii-ect allusion. That royal lady, for whose loss 



246 The Israelite s Grave. 

the marvellous uniformity of the unbroken funeral hue which 
pervades this congregation tells eloquently of general mourn« 
mg, came to this land a few years ago, like Joseph, a foreign- 
er — like Joseph, the earlier years of her sojourn were spent 
in comparative obscurity — like Joseph, she had her share of 
calumny, though in a different form. There are many here 
who can remember that in that year when our political feuds 
had attained the acme of rancor, the irreverent lip of party 
slander dared to breathe its rank venom upon the name of 
one of the gentlest that ever adorned a throne. There are 
some who know how that unpopularity was met: with 
meekness — with Christian forgiveness — with quiet dignity — 
with that composure which is the highest result and evi- 
dence of strength. Like Joseph, she passed through the 
temptations of a court with unsullied spotlessness — like Jo- 
seph, the domestic and social relationships were sustained 
with beautiful fidelity — like Joseph, she lived down opposi- 
tion, outlived calumny — like Joseph, she used the noble in- 
come intrusted to her in acts of almost unexampled munifi- 
cence — like Joseph, her life was checkered with sorrow ; and 
when the clouds of earlier diflSculties had cleared away, the 
rainbow sign of peace, even in the midst of broken health, 
spanned the calmness of her evening years — like Joseph, she 
will have a regal burial, and her ashes will repose with the 
dust of England's princes amidst the mourning of the nation 
in which she found a home. 

The homage which is given to her is not the homage 
yielded to rank or wealth or genius. There will be silver 
on her cofldn, and magnificence in the pageantry which at- 
tends her to the grave;* but it is not in these that the glory 
of her funeral lies. These were the privileges of the most 
profligate of her ancestors as well as her. These are the 
world's rewards for those whom she delights to honor. There 
will be something in her funeral besides which these things 
are mean. There is a grandeur in a nation's tears ; and they^ 
will be shed in unfeigned reverence over the remains of all' 
that was most queenly, and all that was most womanly. 
Ko political fervor mixes with her obsequies. She stood 
identified with no party politics. No peculiar religious par- 
ty mourns its patroness. Of all our jarring religious sects, 
in the Church and out of it, not one dares to claim her as its 
own. Her spirit soared above these things. It is known 

* This anticipation has not been realized. In one of the most touching 
and unaffected documents that ever went right home to English hearts, the 
queen of a British sovereign requested to be borne to the grave as the wife 
of a sailor. 



The Israelite s Grave. ^47 

that she scarcely recognized them. All was lost in the sub- 
limer name of Christian. It is a Christian who has passed 
from this earth away, to take her place in the general As- 
sembly and Church of the first-born : to stand before God, 
the Judge of all, among the spirits of the just made per- 
fect. 

One word more. Honoring the Queen, profoundly rever- 
encing the Woman, let not contemplation stop there. Do 
not bury thought in the human and finite. Mildly as her 
lustre shone on earth, remember it was but one feeble ray of 
the Light that is Uncreated. All that she had she received. 
If we honor her, it is to adore Him who made her what she 
was. Of His fullness she had received, and grace for grace. 
What she was, she became through adoring faith in Christ. 
It is an elevating thing to gaze on human excellence, be- 
cause through it the Highest becomes conceivable. It is a 
spirit-stirring thing to see saintly goodness asserting its ce- 
lestial origin by turning pale the lustre of the highest earth- 
ly rank; for in this universal mourning our noble country 
has not bowed the knee in reverence to the majesty which is 
of time. Every heart in England has felt that the sovereign 
was merged in the servant of Christ. " The King's daugh- 
ter was all glorious within." Hers was Christian goodness. 
Her eyes had beheld the King in His beauty, and therefore 
her life was beautiful, and feminine, and meek, and simple. 
It was all derived beauty. She had robed herself in Christ. 
" Reflecting back, as from a burnished mirror, the glory of 
the Lord, she was changed into the same image, from glory 
to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord."* 

* 2 Cor. iii. 18. This appears to be the true force and rendering of the 
metaphor. 



Subjoined are the directions given by her late Majesty for her own funeral. 
The reader will be glad to have them preserved in a form less inconvenient 
than the columns of a newspaper. Should he be one who feels it a reHef to 
miss, for once, the worn-out conventionalisms of religious expression, and 
come in contact with something fresh and living, he will find more in these 
quiet lines than in ten sermons ; more to make a very happy tear start ; 
more of the simplicity and the beauty of the life in God ; more to cool the 
feverishness of his heart, and still its worldliness into silence ; more of that 
deep rest into which the meek and humble enter ; more that will make him 
long to be simple, and inartificial, and real, as Christ was, desiring only, in 
life, and death, and judgment, to be found in Him. 



248 The Israelites Grave, 

[Copy.] 

" I die in all humility, knowing well that we are all alike before the Tbrona 
of God, and request, therefore, that my mortal remains be conveyed to the 
grave without any pomp or state. They are to be moved to St. George's 
Chapel, Windsor, where I request to have as private and quiet a funeral as 
possible. 

*'I particularly desire not to be laid out in state, and the funeral to take 
place by daylight, no procession, the coffin to be carried by sailors to the 
chapel. 

" AU those of my friends and relations, to a limited number, who wish to 
attend, may do so. My nephew, Prince Edward of Saxe Weimar, Lords 
Howe and Denbigh, the Hon. William Ashley, Mr. Wood, Su* Andrew 
Barnard, and Sir D. Davis, with my dressers, and those of my ladies who 
may wish to attend. 

' ' I die in peace, and wish to be carried to the tomb in peace, and free 
from the vanities and the pomp of this world. 

" I request not to be dissected, nor embalmed ; and desire to give as little 
trouble as possible. 

(Signed) ''Adelaidk R. 

«*Kovember,1849L" 



SERMONS. 



Qnorib Series. 

I. 
THE STAR m THE EAST. 

"Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod 
the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jeiiisalem, saying, 
Where is he that is bom King of the Jews ? for we have seen his star in the 
east, and are come to worship him." — Matt. ii. 1, 2. 

Our subject is the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. 
The King of the Jews has become the Sovereign of the 
world : a fact, one would think, which must cause a secret 
complacency in the heart of all Jews. For that w^hich is 
most deeply working in modern life and thought is the mind 
of Christ. His name has passed over our institutions, and 
much more has His spirit penetrated into our social and do- 
mestic existence. In other words, a Hebrew mind is now, 
and has been for centuries, ruling Europe. 

But the Gospel which He proclaimed was not limited to 
the Hebrews : it was a Gospel for thfe nations. By the death 
of Christ, God has struck His death-blow at the root of the 
hereditary principle. " We be the seed of Abraham " was 
the proud pretension of the Israelite ; and he was told by 
Christ's Gospel that spiritual dignity rests not upon spiritual 
descent, but upon spiritual character. New tribes were 
adopted into the Christian union, and it became clear that 
there was no distinction of race in the spiritual family. The 
Jewish rite of circumcision — a symbol of exclusiveness, cut- 
ting off one nation from all others — was exchanged for Bap- 
tism, the symbol of universality, proclaiming the nearness of 
all to God, His paternity over the human race, and the Son- 
ship of all who chose to claim their privileges. 

This was a Gospel for the world, and nation after nation 



250 The Star in the East, 

accepted it. Churches were formed ; the kingdom which is 
the domain of love grew ; the Roman Empire crumbled into 
fragments ; but every fragment was found pregnan"v with 
life. It brake not as some ancient temple might break,vt8 
broken pieces lying in lifeless ruin, overgrown with weeds : 
ratker as one of those mysterious animals break, of wAich, if 
you rend them asunder, every separate portion forms itself 
mto a new and complete existence. Rome gave way ; but 
every portion became a Christian kingdom, alive with the 
mind of Christ, and developing the Christian idea after its 
own peculiar nature. 

The portion of Scripture selected for the text and for the 
gospel of the day has an important bearing on this great 
Epiphany. The " wise men " belonged to a creed of very 
hoary and venerable antiquity ; a system, too, which had in 
it the elements of strong vitality. For seven centuries after, 
the Mohammedan sword scarcely availed to extirpate it — 
indeed could not. They whom the Mohammedan called fire- 
worshippers clung to their creed with vigor and indestructi- 
ble tenacity, in spite of ail his efibrts. 

Here then, in this act of homage to the Messiah, were the 
representatives of the highest then existing influences of the 
world, doing homage to the Lord of a mightier influence, and 
reverently bending before the dawn of the Star of a new and 
brighter Day. It was the first distinct turning of the Gen- 
tile mind to Christ; the first instinctive craving after a 
something higher than Gentilism could ever satisfy. 

In this light our thoughts arrange themselves thus : 

I. The expectation of the Gentiles. 
II. The Manifestation or Epiphany. 

I. The expectation : " Where is He that is born King of 
the Jews? for we have seen His star in the east, and are 
«^.orae to worship Him." 

Observe — 1. The craving for eternal life. The " wise men" 
were " Magians," that is, Persian priests. The name, howev- 
er, was extended to all the Eastern philosophers who profess- 
ed that religion, or even that philosophy. The Magians were 
chiefly distinguished by being worshippers of the stars, or 
students of astronomy. 

Now astronomy is a science which arises from man's need 
of religion ; other sciences spring out of wants bounded by 
this life. For instance, anatomy presupposes disease. There 
would be no prying into our animal frame, no anatomy, were 
there not a malady to stimulate the inquiry. Navigation 
arises from the necessity of traversing the seas tc appropri- 



The Star in the East. 251 

ate Ine produce of other countries. Charts, and maps, and 
soundings are made, because of a felt earthly want. But 
in astronomy the first impulse of mankind came not from 
the craving of the intellect, but from the necessities of the 
soul. 

If you search down into the constitution of your being till 
you come to the lowest deep of all, underlying all other 
wants you will find a craving for what is infinite — a some- 
thing that desires perfection — a wish that nothing but the 
thought of that which is eternal can satisfy. To the untu- 
tored mind nowhere was that want so called into conscious- 
ness, perhaps, as beneath the mighty skies of the East. Se- 
rene and beautiful are the nights in Persia, and many a wise 
man in earlier days, full of deep thoughts, went out into the 
fields like Isaac to meditate at eventide. God has so made 
us that the very act of looking up produces in us percep- 
tions of the sublime. And then those skies in their calm 
depths mirroring that which is boundless in space and illim- 
itable in time, with a silence profound as death and a motion 
gliding on forever, as if symbolizing eternity of life, no won- 
der if men associated with them their highest thoughts, and 
conceived them to be the home of Deity — no wonder if an 
Eternal Destiny seemed to sit enthroned there — no wonder 
if they seemed to have in their mystic motion an invisible 
sympathy with human life and its mysterious destinies — no 
wonder if he who could read best their laws was reckoned 
best able to interpret the duties of this life, and all that con- 
nects man with that which is invisible — no wonder if, in 
those devout days of young thought, science was only an- 
other name for religion, and the Priest of the great temple 
of the universe was also the Priest in the temple made with 
hands. Astronomy was the religion of the world's youth. 

The Magians were led by the star to Christ ; their as- 
tronomy was the very pathway to their Saviour. 

Ui3on this I make one or two remarks. 

1. The folly of depreciating human wisdom. Of all vani- 
ties, the worst is the vanity of ignorance. It is common 
enough to hear learning decried, as if it were an opposite of 
religion. If that means that science is not religion, and that 
the man who can calculate the motions of the stars may nev- 
er have bowed his soul to Christ, it contains a truth. But 
if it means, as it often does, that learning is a positive incum- 
brance and hindrance to religion, then it is as much as to say 
that the God of nature is not the God of grace; that the 
more you study the Creator's -works, the farther you remove 
from Himself: nay, we must go farther to be consistent, and 



/ 



252 The Star in the East, 

hold, as most uncultivated and rude nations do, that the 
state of idiocy is nearest to that of inspiration. 

There are expressions of St. Paul often quoted as sanction- 
ing this idea. He tells his converts to beware " lest any man 
spoil you through philosophy." Whereupon we take for 
granted that modern philosophy is a kind of antagonist to 
Christianity. This is one instance out of many of the way 
in which an ambiguous word misunderstood becomes the 
source of infinite error. Let us hear St. Paul. He bids Tim- 
othy "beware of profane and old wives' fables." He speaks 
of " endless genealogies " — " worshipping of angels " — " in- 
truding into those things which men have not seen." This 
was the philosophy of those days : a system of wild fancies 
spun out of the brain — somewhat like what we might now 
call demonolatry: but as different from philosophy as any 
two things can differ. 

They forget, too, another thing. Philosophy has become 
Christian ; science has knelt to Christ. There is a deep sig- 
nificance in that homage of the Magians. For it in fact was 
but a specimen and type of that which science has been doing 
ever since. The mind of Christ has not only entered into the 
Temple, and made it the house of prayer, it has entered into 
the temple of science, and purified the spirit of philosophy. 
This is its spirit now, as, expounded by its chief interpreter, 
"Man, the interpreter of Nature, know^s nothing, and can do 
nothing, except that which I^ature teaches him." What is 
this but science bending before the Child, becoming childlike, 
and, instead of projecting its own fancies upon God's world, 
listening reverently to hear what It has to teach him ? In a 
similar spirit, too, spoke the greatest of philosophers, in words 
quoted in every child's book : " I am but a child, picking up 
pebbles on the shore of the great sea of truth," 

Oh, be sure all the universe tells of Christ and leads to 
Christ. Rightly those ancient Magians deemed, in believing 
that God was worshipped truly in that august temple. The 
stars preach the mind of Christ. Not as of old, when a mys- 
tic star guided their feet to Bethlehem, but now, to the mind 
of the astronomer, they tell of eternal order and harmony ; 
they speak of changeless law, where no caprice reigns. You 
may calculate the star's return : and to the day, and hour, 
and minute it will be there. This is the fidelity of God. 
These mute masses obey the law impressed upon them by 
their Creator's hand, unconsciously : and that law is the law 
of their own nature. To understand the laws of our nature, 
and consciously and reverently to obey them, that is the mind 
of Christ, the sublimest spirit of the Gospel. 



The Star in the East, 253 

I remark again — This universe may be studied in an irrev- 
erent spirit. In Dan. ii. 48, we find the reverence which was 
paid to science. Daniel among the Chaldees was made chief 
of the wise men; that is, the first of the Magians: and King 
Nebuchadnezzar bowed before him, with incense and obla- 
tions. In later days we find that spirit changed. Another 
king, Herod, commands the wise men to use their science for 
the purpose of letting him know where the Child was. In 
earlier times they honored the priest of Nature : in later times 
they made use of him. 

Only by a few is science studied now in the sublime and 
reverent spirit of old days. A vulgar demand for utility has 
taken the place of that lowly prostration with which the 
world listened to the discoveries of truth. The discovery of 
some new and mighty agent, by which the east and west are 
brought together in a moment, awakens chiefly the emotion 
of delight in us that correspondence and travelling will be 
quickened. The merchant congratulates himself upon the 
speedier arrival of the news which will give him the start of 
his rivals, and enable him to outrace his competitors in the 
competition of wealth. Yet what is this but the utilitarian 
spirit of Herod, seeing nothing more solemn in a mysterious 
star than the means whereby he might crush his supposed 
rival ? 

There is a spirit which believes that " godliness is gain," 
and aims at being godly for the sake of advantage — which is 
honest, because honesty is the best policy — which says, Do 
right, and you will be the better, that is, the richer for it. 
There is a spirit which seeks for wisdom simply as a means 
to an earthly end — and that often a mean one. This is a 
spirit rebuked by the nobler reverence of the earlier days of 
Magianism. Knowledge for its own pure sake. God for His 
own sake. Truth for the sake of truth. This was the reason 
for which, in earlier days, men read the aspect of the heavens. 

2. Next, in this craving of the Gentiles we meet with traces 
of the yearning of the human soul for light. The Magian sys- 
tem was called the system of light about seven centuries be- 
fore Christ. ■ A great reformer (Zoroaster) had appeared, who 
either restored the system to its purity, or created out of it 
a new system. He said that light is eternal — that the Lord 
of the universe is light ; but because there was an eternal 
light, there was also an eternal poseibility of the absence of 
light. Light and darkness, therefore, were the eternal prin- 
ciples of the universe — net equal principles, but one the nega- 
tion of the otlier. He taught that the soul of man needs 
light — a light external to itself as well as in itse/f. As the 



2 54 The Star in the East, 

eye can not see in darkness, and is useless, so is there a car 
pacity in the soul for light ; but it is not itself light ; it 
needs the Everlasting light from outside itself. 

Hence the stars became worshipped as the symbols of this 
light. But by degrees these stars began to stand in the place 
of the light Himself. This was the state of things in the days 
of these Magians. 

Magianism was now midway between its glory and its de- 
cline. For its glory we must go back to the days of Daniel, 
when a monarch felt it his privilege to do honor to the priest 
of Light — when that priest was the sole medium of commu- 
nication between Deity and man, and through him alone 
"Oromasdes" made his revelations known — when the law 
given by the Magian, revealed by the eternal stars, was " the 
law of the Medes and Persians which altereth not." For its 
lowest degradation we must pass over about half a century 
from the time we are now considering till we find ourselves 
in Samaria, in the presence of Simon the Magian. He gave 
himself out for the great power of God. He prostituted such 
powers and knowledge as he possessed to the object of mak- 
ing gain. Half dupe, half impostor, in him the noble system 
of Light had sunk to petty charlatanism : Magianism had de- 
generated into Magic. 

Midway between these two periods, or rather nearer to the 
latter, stood the Magian of the text. There is a time in the 
history of every superstition when it is respectable, even de- 
serving reverence, when men believed it — when it is in fact 
associated -^-ith the highest feelings that are in man, and the 
channel even for God's manifestation to the soul. And there 
is a time when it becomes less and less credible, when clearer 
science is superseding its pretensions : and then is the period 
in which one class of men like Simon keep up the imposture — 
the priests who will not let the old superstition die, but 
go on, half impostors, half deceived by the strong delusion 
wherewith they believe their own lie — another class, like 
Herod, the wise men of the world, who patronize it for their 
own purposes, and make use of it as an engine of state — 
another still, who turn from side to side, feeling M'ith horror 
the old, and all that they held dear, crumbling away beneath 
them : the ancient lights going out, more than half suspecting 
the falsehood of all the rest, and with an earnestness amount- 
ing almost to agony, leaving their own homes and inquiring 
for fresh light. 

Such was the posture of these Magians. You can not en- 
ter into their questions or sympathize with their wants un- 
less you realize all this. For that desire for light is one of 



The Star in the East. 255 

the most impassioned of our nobler natures. That noble 
prayer of the ancient world {kv II ^ati kui oXeacroy), " Give 
light, and let us die:" can we not feel.it? Light — light 
Oh, if the result were the immediate realization of the old fa^ 
ble, and the blasting of the daring spirit in the moment of 
revelation of its God, yet give us light. The wish for light, 
the expectation of the manifestation of God, is the mystery 
which lies beneath the history of the whole ancient world. 

n. The Epiphany itself. 

First, they found a king. There is something very signifi- 
cant in the fact of that king being discovered as a child. 
The royal child was the answer to their desires. There are 
two kinds of monarchy, rule or command. One is that of 
hereditary title; the other is that of Divine Right. There 
are kings of men's making, and kings of God's making. The 
secret of that command which men obey involuntarily is sub- 
mission of the ruler himself to law. And this is the secret 
af the royalty of the humanity of Christ. No principle 
t Jrough all His life is more striking, none characterizes it so 
peculiarly, as His submission to another will. " I came not 
to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me." 
"The words which I speak, I speak not of myself" His 
commands are not arbitrary. They are not laws given on 
authority only, they are the eternal laws of our humanity, to 
which He himself submitted: obedience to which alone can 
make our being attain its end. This is the secret of His king- 
ship — "He became obedient . . . wherefore God also hath 
highly exalted Him." And this is the secret of all influence 
and all command. Obedience to a law above you subjugates 
minds to you who never would have yielded to mere will. 
" Rule thyself, thou rulest all." 

2. Next, observe the adoration of the Magians — very 
touching, and full of deep truth. The wisest of the world 
bending before the Child. Remember the history of Ma- 
gianism. It began with awe, entering into this world be- 
neath the serene skies of the East ; in wonder and worship. 
It passed into priestcraft and skepticism. It ended in won- 
der and adoration as it had begun : only with a truer and 
nobler meaning. 

This is but a representation of human life. " Heaven lies 
around us in our infancy." The child looks on this world of 
God's as one, not many — all beautiful — wonderful — God's — ■ 
the creation of a Father's hand. The man dissects, breaks 
it into fragments — loses love and worship in speculation and 
reasonin^-^ becomes more manly, more independent, and lesa 



2^6 The Star in the East 

irradiated with a sense of the presence of the Lord of all ; tiH 
at last, after many a devious wandering, if he be one whom 
the Star of God is leading blind by a way he knows not, he 
begins to see all as one again, and God in all. Back comes 
the child-like spirit once more in the Christianity of old age. 
We kneel before the Child — we feel that to adore is greater 
than to reason — that to love, and worship, and believe, bring 
the soul nearer heaven than scientific analysis. The Child is 
nearer God than we. 

And this, too, is one of the deep sayings of Christ — "Ex- 
cept ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall 
in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven." 

3. Lastly — In that Epiphany we have to remark the Ma- 
gians' joy. They had seen the star in the east. They fol- 
lowed it — it seemed to go out in dim obscurity. They went 
about inquiring : asked Herod, who could tell them nothing : 
asked the scribes, who only gave them a vague direction. 
At last the star shone out once more, clear before them in 
their path. " When they saw the star, they rejoiced with 
exceeding great joy." 

Perhaps the hearts of some of us can interpret that. There 
are some who have seen the star that shone in earlier days 
go out ; quench itself in black vapors or sour smoke. There 
are some who have followed many a star that turned out to 
be but an ignis fatuus — one of those bright exhalations which 
hover over marshes and church-yards, and only lead to the 
chambers of the dead, or the cold damp pits of disappoint- 
ment: and oh, the blessing of "exceeding joy," after follow- 
ing in vain — after inquiring of the great men and learning 
nothing — of the religious men and finding little- — to see the 
star at last resting over " the place Avhere the young Child 
lies " — after groping the way alone, to see the star stand still 
— to find that Religion is a thing far simpler than we thought 
— that God is near us — that to kneel and adore is the noblest 
posture of the soul. For, whoever will follow with fidelity 
his own star, God will guide him aright. He spoke to the 
Magians by the star; to the shepherds by the melody of the 
heavenly host ; to Joseph by a dream ; to Simeon by an in- 
ward revelation. "Gold, and frankincense, and myrrh" — 
these, and ten times these, were poor and cheap to give for 
that blessed certainty that the star of God is on before us. 

Two practical hints in conclusion. 

1. A hint of immortality. That star is now looking down 
on the wise men's graves ; and if there be no life to come, 
then this is the confusion : that mass of inert matter is pur- 
Buing its way through space, and the minds that watched it, 



The Healing of Jairus' s Daughter. 257 

calculated its movements, were led by it through aspiring 
wishes to holy adorations; those minds, more precious than 
a thousand stars, haA^e dropped out of God's universe. And 
then God cares for mere material masses more than for spirits, 
which are the emanation and cop}'- of Himself Impossible ! 
" God is not the God of the dead, but of the living." God is 
the Father of our spirits. Eternity and immeasurableness 
belong to Thought alone. You may measure the cycles of 
that star by years and miles : can you bring any measure- 
ment which belongs to time or space, by which you can com- 
pute the length or breadth or the duration of one pure 
thought, one aspiration, one moment of love ? This is eter- 
nity. Nothing but thought can be immortal. 

2. Learn, finally, the truth of the Epiphany by heart. To 
the Jew it chiefly meant that the Gentile too could become 
the child of God. But to us ; is that doctrine obsolete ? 
Nay, it requires to be reiterated in this age as much as in 
any other. There is a spirit in all our hearts whereby we 
would monopolize God, conceiving of Him as an unapproack 
able Being ; whereby we may terrify other men outside our 
own pale, instead of as the Father that is near to all, whom 
we may approach, and whom to adore is blessedness. 

This is our Judaism: we do not believe in the Epiphany. 
We do not believe that God is the Father of the world — we do 
not actually credit that He has a star for the Persian priest, 
and celestial melody for the Hebrew shepherd, and an unsyl- 
labled voice for all the humble and inquiring spirits in His 
world. Therefore remember Christ has broken down the 
middle wall of partition ; He has revealed God as Our Fa- 
ther; proclaimed that there is no distinction in the spiritual 
family, and established a real Brotherhood on earth. 



n. 
THE HEALING OF JAIRUS'S DAUGHTER. 

"And when Jesus came into the ruler's house, and saw the minstrels and 
the people making a noise, he said unto them. Give place ■ for the maid is 
not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn. But when the 
people were put forth, he went in, and took her by the hai»d, and the maid 
arose." — Matt. ix. 23-25. 

This is one of a pair of miracles, the full instruction from 
neither of which can be gained, unless taken in connection 
with the other. 



258 The Healing of Jairus' s Daughter, 

On His way to heal the daughter of Jairus, the Son of Man 
was accosted by another sufferer, afflicted twelve years with 
an issue of blood. Humanly speaking, there were many causes 
which might have led to the rejection of her request. The 
case of Jairus's daughter was urgent ; a matter of life and 
death ; delay might be fatal ; a few minutes might make all the 
difference between living and dying. Yet Jesus not only per- 
formed the miracle, but refused to perform it in a hurried 
way ; paused to converse — to inquire who had touched Him — 
to perfect the lesson of the whole. On his way to perform one 
act of love, He turned aside to give His attention to another. 

The practical lesson is this: There are many who are so 
occupied by one set of duties as to have no time for others : 
some whose life-business is the suppression of the slave-trad^ 
— the amelioration of the state of prisons — the reformation 
of public abuses. Right, except so far as they are monopo- 
lized by these, and feel themselves discharged from other ob- 
ligations. The minister's work is spiritual; the physician's 
temporal. But if the former neglect physical needs, or the 
latter shrink from spiritual opportunities on the plea that the 
cure of bodies, not of souls, is his work, so far they refuse to 
imitate their Master. 

He had an ear open for every tone of wail, a heart ready 
to respond to every species of need. Specially the Redeem- 
er of the soul. He was yet as emphatically the " Saviour of 
the body." He " taught the people," but he did not neglect 
to multiply the loaves and fishes. The peculiar need of the 
woman, the father's cry of anguish, the infant's cry of help- 
lessness, the Avail of oppression, and the shriek of pain, all 
were heard by Him, and none were heard in vain. 

Therein lies the difference between Christian love and the 
impulse of mere inclination. We hear of men being " inter- 
ested " in a cause. It has some peculiar charm for them in- 
dividually : the wants of the heathen, or the destitution of 
the soldier and sailor, or the conversion of the Jews — accord- 
ing to men's associations, or fancies, or peculiar bias — may 
engage their attention and monopolize their sympathy. I 
am far from saying these are wrong : I only say that so far 
as they only interest^ and monopolize interest, the source 
from which they spring is only human, and not the highest. 
The difference between such beneficence and that which is 
the result of Christian love, is marked by partiality in one 
case, universality in the other. Love is universal. It is in- 
terested in all that is human : not merely in the concerns of 
its own family, nation, sect, or circle of associations. Hu- 
manity is the sphere of its activity. 



The Healing of J aims' s Daughter, 259 

Here, too, we find the Son of Man the pattern of our hu- 
manity. His bosom was to mankind what the ocean is to 
the world. The ocean has its own mighty tide ; but it re- 
ceives and responds to, in exact proportion, the tidal influ- 
ences of every estuary, and river, and small creek which 
pours into its bosom. So it was in Christ; His bosom 
heaved with the tides of our humanity ; but every separate 
sorrow, pain, and joy gave its pulsation, and received back 
influence from the sea of His being. 

Looking at this matter somewhat more closely, it will be 
plain that the delay was only apparent — seemingly there 
was delay, and fatal delay : while He yet spake there came 
news of the child's death. But just so far as the resurrec- 
tion of the dead is a mio-htier miracle than the healino; of the 
sick, just so far did the delay enhance and illustrate, instead 
of dimming the glory of His mission. 

But more definitely still. The miracles of Jesus were not 
merely arbitrary acts: they were subject to the laws of the 
spiritual world. It was, we may humbly say, impossible to 
convey a spiritual blessing to one who was not spiritually 
susceptible. A certain inward character, a certain relation 
(rapport) to the Redeemer, was required to make the mercy 
efficacious. Hence in one place we read, "He could not do 
many miracles there because of their unbelief" And His 
perpetual question was, " Believest thou that I am able to 
do this?" 

Now Jairus beheld this miracle. He saw the woman's 
modest touch approaching the hem of the Saviour's garment. 
He saw the abashed look with which she shrunk from public 
gaze and exposure. He heard the language of Omniscience, 
" Somebody hath touched Me." He heard the great princi- 
ple enunciated, that the only touch which reaches God is 
that of faith. The multitude may throng and press ; but 
heart to heart, soul to soul, mind to mind, only so do we 
come in actual contact with God. And remembering this, it 
is a matter not of probability but of certainty, that the soul 
of Jairus was actually made more capable of a blessing than 
before — that he must have walked with a more hopeful step 
• — that he must have heard the announcement, " Thy daugh- 
ter is dead," with less dismay — that the words, " Fear not, 
only believe," must have come to him with deeper meaning, 
and been received with more implicit trust than if Jesus had 
not paused to heal the woman, but hurried on. 

And this is the principle of the spiritual kingdom. In 
matters worldly, the more occupations, duties, a man has, the 
more certain is he of doing all imperfectly. In the things 



26o The Healing of Jairus's Daughter. 

of God this is reversed. The more duties you perform, the 
more you are fitted for doing others : what you lose in time, 
you gain in strength. You do not love God the less, but the 
more, for loving man. You do not weaken your affection 
for your family by cultivating attachments beyond its pale, 
but deepen and intensify it. Respect for the alien, tender- 
ness for the heretic, do not interfere with, but rather 
strengthen, attachment to your own country and your own 
church. He who is most liberal in the case of a foreign 
famine or a distant mission, will be found to have only learn- 
ed more liberal love towards the poor and the unspiritual- 
ized of his own land : so false is the querulous complaint that 
money is drained away by such calls, to the disadvantage of 
more near and juster claims. 

You do not injure one cause of mercy by turning aside to 
listen to the call of another. 

I. The uses of adversity. 
II. The principles of a miracle. 

I. The simplest and most obvious use of sorrow is to re- 
mind of God. Jairus and the woman, like many others, 
came to Christ from a sense of want. It would seem that a 
certain shock is needed to bring us in contact with reality. 
We are not conscious of our breathing till obstruction makes 
it felt. We are not aware of the possession of a heart till 
some disease, some sudden joy or sorrow, rouses it into extra- 
ordinary action. And we are not conscious of the mighty 
cravings of our half Divine humanity ; we are not aware of 
the God within us, till some chasm yawns which must be 
filled, or till the rending asunder of our afifections forces us to 
become fearfully conscious of a need. 

And this, too, is the reply to a rebellious question which our 
hearts are putting perpetually : Why am I treated so ? 
Why is my health or my child taken from me? What have 
I done to deserve this ? So Job passionately complained 
that God had set him up as a mark to empty His quiver on. 

The reply is, that gifts are granted to elicit our affections ; 
they are resumed to elicit them still more ; for we never 
know the value of a blessing till it is gone. Health, children 
— we must lose them before we know the love which they 
contain. 

However, we are not prepared to say that a charge might 
not with some plausibility be brought against the love of 
God, were no intimation ever given that God means to re- 
suiT'e His blessings. Tliat man may fairly complain of his 
adopted father who has been educated as his own son, and 



The Healing of yairus's Daughter. 261 

after contracting habits of extravagance, looking forward to 
a certain line of life, cultivating certain tastes, is informed 
that he is only adopted : that he must part with these tem- 
porary advantages, and sink into a lower sphere. It would 
be a poor excuse to say that all he had before was so much 
gain, and unmerited. It is enough to reply that false hopes 
were raised, and knowingly. 

Nay, the laAvs of countries sanction thiSo After a certain 
period, a title to property can not be interfered with : if a 
right of way or road has existed, in the venerable language 
of the law, after a custom " whereof the memory of man 
runneth not to the contrary," no private right, however dig- 
nified, can overthrow the public claim. I do not say that a 
bitter feeling might not have some show of justice if such 
were the case with God's blessings. 

But the truth is this : God confers His gifts with distinct 
reminders that they are His. He gives us, for a season, 
spirits taken out of His universe; brings them into temporary 
contact with us ; and we call them father, mother, sister, 
child, friend. But just as in some places, on one day in the 
year the way or path is closed in order to remind the public 
that they pass by sufferance and not by right, in order that 
no lapse of time may establish "adverse possession," so does 
God give warning to us. Every ache and pain — every 
wrinkle you see stamping itself on a parent's brow — every 
accident which reveals the uncertain tenure of life and pos 
sessions — every funeral-bell that tolls, are only Gcd's re- 
minders that we are tenants at will and not by right : pen- 
sioners on the bounty of an hour. He is closing up the right 
of way, warning fairly that what we have is lent, not given : 
His, not ours. His mercies are so much gain. The resump- 
tion of them is no injustice. Job learned that, too, by heart, 
"The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away : blessed be 
the name of the Lord." 

Again — observe the misuse of sorrow. Wlien Jesus came 
to the house. He found the minstrels and people making a 
noise. In the East, not content with natural grief, they use 
artificial means to deepen and prolong it. Men and women 
make it a separate profession to act as mourners, to exhibit 
for hire the customary symbols and wail of grief, partly to 
Boothe and partly to rivet sorrow deeply, by the expression 
of it. 

The South and Korth difier greatly from each other in 
this respect. The nations of the North restrain their grief — 
affect the tearless eyes and the stern look. The expressive 
South, and all the nations whose origin is from tlience, are 



262 The Healing of yairus^s Daughter, 

demonstrative in grief. They beat their breasts, tear their 
hair, throw dust upon their heads. It would be unwise 
were either to blame or ridicule the other so long as each is 
true to Nature. Unwise for the nations of the South tc 
deny the reality of the grief which is repressed and silent ; 
unjust in the denizen of the North were he to scorn the 
violence of Southern grief, or call its uncontrollable demon- 
strations unmanly. Much must be allowed for tempera- 
ment. 

These two opposite tendencies, however, indicate the two 
extremes into which men may fall in this matter of sorrow. 
There are two ways in which we may defeat the purposes of 
God in grief — by forgetting it, or by over-indulging it. 

The world's way is to forget. It prescribes gayety as the 
remedy for woe ; banishes all objects which recall the past ; 
makes it the etiquette of feeling, even amongst near relations, 
to abstain from the mention of the names of the lost ; gets 
rid of the mourning weeds as soon as possible — the worst of 
all remedies for grief. Sorrow, the discipline of the Cross, is 
the school for all that is highest in us. Self-knowledge, true 
power, all that dignifies humanity, are precluded the moment 
you try to me?ely banish grief. It is a touching truth that 
the Saviour refused the anodyne on the cross that would 
have deadened pain. He would not steep his senses in ob- 
livion. He would not suffer one drop to trickle down the 
side of His Father's cup of anguish untasted. 

The other way is to nurse sorrow : nay, even our best af- 
fections may tempt us to this. It seems treason to those we 
have loved to be happy now. We sit beneath the cypress ; 
we school ourselves to gloom. Romance magnifies the fidel- 
ity of the broken heart : we refuse to be comforted. 

Now, generally speaking, all this must be done by effort. 
For God has so constituted both our hearts and the world, 
that it is hard to prolong grief beyond a time. Say what 
we will, the heart has in it a surprising, nay, a startling 
elasticity. It can not sustain unalterable melancholy ; and 
beside our very pathway plants grow, healing and full of 
balm. It is a sullen heart that can withstand the slow but 
sure influences of the morning sun, the summer sky, the trees 
and flowers, and the soothing power of human sympathy. 

We are meant to sorrow, "but not as those without 
hope." The rule seems to consist in being simply natural. 
The great thing which Christ did was to call men back to 
simplicity and nature — not to perverted, but original nature. 
He counted it no derogation of His manhood to be seen to 
weep ; he thought it no shame to mingle with merry crowds j 



The Healing of Jairus's Daughter, 263 

He opened His heart wide to all the genial and all the mourn- 
ful impressions of this manifold life of ours. And this is 
what we have to do ; be natural. Let God, that is, let the 
influences of God, freely play unthwarted upon the soul. 
Let there be no unnatural repression, no control of feeling 
by mere efibrt. Let there be no artificial and prolonged 
grief, no " minstrels making a noise." Let great Nature 
have her way ; or, rather, feel that you are in a Father's 
world, and live in it with Him, frankly, in a free, fearless, 
childlike, and natural spirit. Then grief will do its work 
healthily. The heart will bleed, and stanch when it has bled 
enough. Do not stop the bleeding ; but, also, do not open 
the wound afresh. 

n. We come to the principles on which a miracle rests. 
1. I observe that the perception of it was confined to a 
few. Peter, James, John, and the parents of the child were 
the only persons present. The rest were excluded. To 
behold wonders, certain inward qualifications, a certain state 
of heart, a certain susceptibility are required. Those who 
were shut out were rendered incapable by disqualifications. 
Absence of spiritual susceptibility in the case of those who 
" laughed Him to scorn " — unbelief, in those who came with 
courteous skepticism, saying, " Trouble not the Master ;" in 
other words. He is not master of impossibilities — unreality 
in the professional mourners — the most helpless of all dis- 
qualifications. Their whole life was acting : they had caught 
the tone of condolence and sympathy as a trick. Before 
minds such as these the wonders of creation may be spread 
in vain. Grief and joy alike are powerless to break through 
the crust of artificial semblance which envelops them. Such 
beings see no miracles. They gaze on all with dead, dim 
eyes — wrapped in conventionalisms, their life a drama in 
which they are but actors, modulating their tones and simu- 
lating feelings according to a received standard. How can 
such be ever witnesses of the supernatural, or enter into the 
presence of the wonderful ? 

Two classes alone were admitted. They who, like Peter, 
James, and John, lived the life of courage, moral purity, and 
love, and they who, like the parents, had had the film re- 
moved from their eyes by grief For there is a way which 
God has of forcing the spiritual upon men's attention. 
When you shut down the lid upon the cofiin of a child, or 
one as dearly loved, there is an awful want, a horrible sense 
of insecurity, which sweeps away the s^littering mist of time 
from the edge of the abyss, and you gaze ou the phantom 



264 The Healing of Jairus's Daughter, 

wonders of the unseen. Yes, real anguish qualifies for an 
entrance into the solemn chamber where all is miracle. 

In another way, and for another reason, the numbers of 
those who witness a miracle must be limited. Jairus had 
his daughter restored to life : the woman was miraculously- 
healed. But if every anxious parent and every sick sufferer 
could have the wonder repeated in his or her case, the won- 
der itself would cease. This is the preposterousness of the 
skeptic's demand — Let me see a miracle, on an appointed day 
and hour, and I will believe. Let us examine this. 

A miracle is commonly defined to be a contravention of 
the laws of nature. More properly speaking, it is only a 
higher operation of those same laws in a form hitherto un- 
geen. A miracle is perhaps no more a suspension or contra- 
diction of the laws of nature than a hurricane or a thunder- 
storm. They who first travelled to tropical latitudes came 
back with anecdotes of supernatural convulsions of the ele- 
ments. In truth, it was only that they had never personally 
witnessed such effects ; but the hurricane which swept the 
waves flat, and the lightning which illuminated all the heav- 
en, or played upon the bayonets or masts in lambent flames, 
were but effects of the very same laws of electricity and me- 
teorology which were in operation at home. 

A miracle is perhaps no more in contravention of the laws 
of the universe, than the direct interposition of a whole na- 
tion in cases of emergency to uphold what is right in oppo- 
/jition to what is established, is an opposition to the laws of 
the realm. For instance, the whole people of Israel reversed 
the unjust decree of Saul which had sentenced Jonathan to 
death. But law is the expression only of a people's will. 
Ordinarily we see that expression mediately made through 
judges, oflice-bearers, kings : and so long as we see it in this 
mediate form, we are by habit satisfied that all is legal. 
There are cases, however, in which, not an indirect, but a 
direct expression of a nation's will is demanded. Extraordi- 
nary cases : and because extraordinary, they who can only 
see what is legal in what is customary, conventional, and in 
the routine of written precedents, get bewildered, and reck- 
on the anomalous act illegal or rebellious. In reality, it is 
only the source of earthly law, the nation, pronouncing the 
law without the intervention of the subordinate agents. 

This will help us to understand the nature of a miracle. 
What we call laws are simply the subordinate expressions of 
a will. There must be a will before there can be a law. 
Certain antecedents are followed by certain consequents. 
When we see tliis succession, we are satisfied, and call it nat- 



The Healing of yairus's Daughter. 265 

ural. But there are emergencies in which it may be neces- 
sary for the will to assert itself, and become not the mediate, 
but the immediate antecedent to the consequent. " No sub- 
ordinate agent interposes ; simply the first cause comes in 
contact with a result. The audible expression of will is fol- 
lowed immediately by something which is generally pre- 
ceded by some lower antecedent which we call a cause. In 
this case, you will observe, there has been no contravention 
of the laws of nature, there has only been an immediate 
connection between the first cause and the last result. A 
miracle is the manifestation to man of the voluntariness of 
power. 

Now, bearing this in mind, let it be supposed that every 
one had a right to demand a miracle — that the occurrence 
of miracles was unlimited — that as often as you had an ache, 
or trembled for the loss of a relation, you had but to pray, 
and receive your wish. 

Clearly in this case, first of all, the constitution of the uni- 
verse would be reversed. The will of man would be substi- 
tuted for the will of God. Caprice and chance would regu- 
late all : God would be dethroned ; God would be degraded 
to the rank of one of those beings of supernatural power with 
whom Eastern romance abounds, who are subordinated by a 
spell to the will of a mortal, who is armed with their powers 
and uses them as vassals ; God would be merely the genius 
who would be chained by the spell of prayer to obey the be- 
hests of man. Man would arm himself with the powers of 
Deity, and God would be his slave. 

Further still : This unlimited extension of miracles would 
annihilate miracles themselves. For suppose that miracles 
were universal — that prayer was directly followed by a re- 
ply — that we could all heal the sick and raise the dead — this 
then would become the common order of things. It would 
be what we now call nature. It would cease to be extraor- 
dinary, and the infidel would be as unsatisfied as ever. He 
would see only the antecedent, prayer, and the invariable 
consequent, a reply to prayer ; exactly what he sees now in 
the process of causation. And then, just as now, he would 
say, What more do you want ? These are the laws of the 
universe: Why interpose the complex and cumbrous ma- 
chinery of a God, the awkward hypothesis of a will, to ac- 
count for laws ? 

Miracles, then, are necessarily limited. The non-limita- 
tion of miracles would annihilate the miraculous. 

Lastly ; it is the intention of a miracle to manifest the Di- 
vine in the common and ordinarv. 



266 The Healing of Jairus' s Daughter, 

For instance, in a boat on the Sea of Tiberias the Redeem- 
er rose and rebuked the storm. Was that miracle merely a 
proof of His divine mission ? Are we merely to gather from 
it that then and there on a certain day, in a certain obscure 
corner of the world, Divine power was at work ? It is con- 
ceivable that a man might credit .that miracle — that he 
might be exceedingly indignant with the rationalist who re- 
solves it into a natural phenomenon — and it is conceivable 
that that very man might tremble in a storm. To what 
purpose is that miracle announced to him ? He believes in 
God existing in the past, but not in the present ; he believes 
in a Divine presence in the supernatural, but discredits it in 
the natural ; he recognizes God in the marvellous, but does 
not feel Him in the wonderful of every day : but unless it 
has taught him that the waves and winds noio are in the 
hollow of the hand of God, the miracle has lost its mean- 
ing. 

Here again, as in many other cases, Christ healed sickness 
and raised the dead to life. Are we merely to insert this 
among the " Evidences of Christianity," and then, with law- 
yer-like sagacity, having laid down the rules of evidence, 
say to the infidel, " Behold our credentials ; we call upon 
you to believe our Christianity ?" This were a poor reason 
to account for the putting forth of Almighty Power. More 
truly and more deeply, these miracles were vivid manifesta- 
tions to the senses that Christ is the Saviour of the body — 
that now, as then, the issues of life and death are in His 
hands — that our daily existence is a perpetual miracle. The 
extraordinary was simply a manifestation of God's power in 
the ordinary. Nay, the ordinary marvels are greater than 
the extraordinary, for these are subordinate to them ; mere- 
ly indications and handmaids guiding us to perceive and 
recognize a constant Presence, and reminding us that in 
everyday existence the miraculous and the Godlike rule us. 



Baptism. 267 



m. 
BAPTISM. 

*'For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as 
many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There 
is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male 
nor female : for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ's, then 
are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise. " — Gal. iii. 26-29. 

Wherever opposite views are held with warmth by re- 
ligious-minded men, we may take for granted that there is 
some higher truth which embraces both. All high truth is 
the union of two contradictories. Thus predestination and 
free-will are opposites : and the truth does not lie between 
these two, but in a higher reconciling truth which leaves 
both true. So with the opposing views of baptism. Men of 
equal spirituality are ready to sacrifice all to assert, or to 
deny, the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. And the truth, 
I believe, will be found, not in some middle, moderate, timid 
doctrine which skillfully avoids extremes, but in a truth 
larger than either of these opposite views, which is the basis 
of both, and which really is that for which each party tena- 
ciously clings to its own view as to a matter of life and 
death. 

The present occasion* only requires us to examine three 
views. 

I. That of Rome. 
II. That of modern Calvinism. 

III. That of (as I believe) Scripture and the Church of Eng- 
land. 

I. The doctrine of Rome respecting baptism. We will 
take her own authorities. 

1. "If any one say that the sin of Adam .... is taken 
away, either by the powers of human nature or by any other 
remedy than the merit of the One Mediator, our Lord Jesus 
Christ, .... or denies that the merit of Jesus Christ, duly 
conferred by the sacrament of baptism in the church form, is 
applied to adults as well as to children — let him be accursed." 
— Sess. V. 4. 

" If any one deny that the imputation of original sin is re- 

* The recent decision on the Gorham case of the Pri-sy Council. 



268 Baptism, 

mitted by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is con- 
ferred in baptism, or even asserts that the whole of that 
which has the true and proper character of sin, is not taken 
away, but only not imputed — let hiln be accursed." — Sess. 
V. 5. 

" If any one say that grace is not given by sacraments of 
this kind always and to all, so far as God's part is concerned, 
but only at times, and to some, although they be duly re- 
ceived — let him be accursed." 

" If any one say that by the sacraments of the Xew Cove- 
nant themselves, grace is not conferred by the eflScacy of the 
rite (opus operatum), but that faith alone is sufficient for ob- 
taining grace — let him be accursed." 

" If any one say that in three sacraments, i. e., baptism, con- 
firmation, and orders, a character is not impressed upon the 
soul, i. e., a certain spiritual and indelible mark (for which 
reason they can not be repeated) — let him be accursed." — 
Sess. vii. cap. 7-9. 

" By baptism, putting on Christ, we are made a new crea- 
tion in Him, obtaining plenary and entire remission of all 
sins." 

It is scarcely possible to misrepresent the doctrine so plain- 
ly propounded. Christ's merits are instrumentally applied 
by baptism ; original sin is removed by a change of nature ; 
a new character is imparted to the soul ; a germinal principle 
or seed of life is miraculously given ; and all this in virtue not 
of any condition in the recipient, nor of any condition at all 
except that of the due performance of the rite. 

This view is held, with varieties and modifications of many 
kinds, by an increasingly large number of the members of 
the Church of England ; but we do not concern ourselves 
with these timid modifications, which painfully attempt to 
draw some subtle hair's-breadth distinction between them- 
selves and the above* doctrine. The true, honest, and only 
honest representation of this view is that put forward undis- 
guisedly by Rome. 

When it is objected to the Romanist that there is no evi- 
dence in the life of the baptized child difierent from that 
given by the unbaptized sufficient to make credible a change 
so enormous, he replies, as in the case of the other sacrament, 
The miracle is invisible. You can not see the bread and wine 
become flesh and blood ; but the flesh and blood are there, 
whether you see them or not. You can not see the efiects 
of regeneration, but they are there, hidden, whether visible 
to you or not. In other words, Christ lias declared that it is 
with every one born of the Spirit as with tlie wind, "77/r)7^ 



Baptism. 269 

nearest the sound thereof.'''' But the Romanist distinctly 
holds that you can not hear the sound — that the wind hath 
blown, but there is no sound — that the Spirit hath descended, 
and there are no fruits whereby the tree is known. 

In examining this view, at the outset we deprecate those 
vituperative and ferocious expressions which are used so 
commonly against the Church of Rome — unbecoming in pri- 
vate conversation, disgraceful on the platform, they are still 
more unpardonable in the pulpit. I am not advocating that 
feeble softness of mind which can not speak strongly because 
it can not feel strongly. I know the value, and in their 
place, the need of strong words. I know that the Redeemer 
used them : stronger and keener never fell from the lips of 
man. I am aware that our Reformers used coarse and ve- 
hement language ; but we do not imbibe the Reformers' 
spirit by the mere adoption of the Reformers' language; 
nay, paradoxical as it may seem, the use of their language 
even proves a degeneracy from their spirit. You will find 
harsh and gross expressions enough in the Homilies, but re- 
member that when they spoke thus, Rome was in the as- 
cendency. She had the power of fire and sword ; and the 
men who spoke so were candidates for martyrdom, by the 
expressions that they used. Every one might be called 
upon by fire and steel to prove the quality of what was in 
him, and account for the high pretension of his words. I 
grant the grossness. But when they spoke of the harlotries 
of Rome, and spoke of her adulteries, and fornications, and 
lies which she had put in full cup to the lip of nations, it was 
the sublime defiance of free-hearted men against oppression 
in high places, and falsehood dominant. But now, when 
Rome is no longer dominant, and the only persecutions that 
we hear of are the petty persecutions of Protestants among 
themselves, to use language such as this is not the spirit of a 
daring Reformer, but only the pusillanimous shriek of a cru- 
el cowardice which keeps down the enemy whose rising it is 
afraid of 

We will do justice to this doctrine of Rome. It has this 
merit at least, that it recognizes the character of a church : 
it admits it to be a society, and not an association. An as- 
sociation is an arbitrary union. Men form associations for 
temporary reasons ; and, arbitrarily made, they can be arbi- 
trarily dissolved. Society, on the contrary, is made, not by 
will, but facts. Brotherhood, sonship, families, nations are 
nature's work : real facts. Rome acknowledges this. It per- 
mits no arbitrary drawing of the lines of that which calls it- 
self the Church. A large, broad, mighty field : the Christian 



2 70 Baptism, 

world : all baptized : nay, expressly, even those who are 
baptized by heretics. It shares the spirit, instead of mo- 
nopolizing it. 

Practically, therefore, in the matter of education, we should 
teach children on the basis on which Rome works. We say 
as Rome says, You are the child of God : baptism declares 
you such. Rome says as Paul says, " As many of you as are 
baptized into Christ have put on Christ." 

Consequently, we distinguish between this doctrine as 
held by spiritual and as held by unspiritual men. Spiritu- 
ality often neutralizes error in views. Men are often better 
than their creeds. The Calvinist ought to be an Antinomi- 
an — he is not. So, in holy-minded men, this doctrine of bap- 
tismal regeneration loses its perniciousness — nay, even be- 
comes, in erroneous form, a precious, blessed truth. 

It is quite another thing, however, held by unspiritual 
men. Our objections to this doctrine are, 

1. Because it assumes baptism to be not the testimony to 
a fact, but the fact itself Baptism proclaims the child of 
God. The Romanist says it creates him. Then and there a 
mysterious change takes place, inward, spiritual, effected by 
an external rite. This makes baptism not a sacrament, but 
an event. 

2. Because it is materialism of the grossest kind. The or- 
der of Christian life is from within to that which is without 
• — from the spiritual truth to the material expression of it. 
The Roman order is from the outward to the creation of the 
inward. This is magic. The Jewish Cabalists believed that 
the pronunciation of certain magical words engraved on the 
seal of Solomon would perform marvels. The whole Eastern 
world fancied that such spells could transform one being 
into another — a brute into a man, or a man into a brute. 
Books containing such trash were burnt at Ephesus in the 
dawn of Christianity. But here, in the midday of Chris- 
tianity, we have belief in such spells, given, it is true that it 
is said, by God, whereby the demoniacal nature can be exor- 
cised, the Divine implanted in its stead, and the evil heart 
transformed unconsciously into a pure spirit. 

Now this is degrading God. Observe the results: A child 
is to be baptized on a given day ; but when that day ar- 
rives the child is unwell, and the ceremony must be post- 
poned another week or month. Again a delay takes place 
— the day is damp or cold. At last the time arrives ; the 
service is read ; it may require, if read slowly, five minutes 
more than ordinarily. Then and there, when that reading is 
Blowly accomplished, the mystery is achieved. And all this 



Baptism, 271 

time, while the child is ill, while the weather is bad, while 
the reader procrastinates — I say it solemnly — the Eternal 
Spirit who rules this universe must wait patiently, and come 
down, obedient to a mortal's spell, at the very second that it 
suits his convenience. God must wait attendance on the ca- 
price of a careless parent, ten thousand accidents, nay, the 
leisure of an indolent or an immoral priest. Will you dare 
insult the Majesty on high by such a mockery as this result? 

3. We object, because this view makes Christian life a 
struggle for something that is lost, instead of a progress to 
something that lies before. Let no one fancy that Rome's 
doctrine on this matter makes salvation an easy thing. The 
Spirit of God is given — the germ is implanted ; but it may 
be crushed, injured, destroyed. And her doctrine is, that 
venial sins after baptism are removed by absolutions and at- 
tendance on the ordinances : whereas for mortal sins there is 
— not no hope — but no certainty ever after until the judg- 
ment-day. Vicious men may make light of such teaching, 
and get periodic peace, from absolution, to go and sin again ; 
but to a spiritual Romanist this doctrine is no encourage- 
ment for laxity. Now observe, after sin life becomes the ef- 
fort to get back to where you were years ago. It is the sad 
longing glance at the Eden from which you have been ex- 
pelled, which is guarded now by a fiery sword in this world 
forever. And, therefore, whoever is familiar with the writ- 
ings of some of the earliest leaders of the present movement 
Romeward, writings that rank among the most touching and 
beautiful of English compositions, will remember the marked 
tone of sadness which pervades them — their high, sad long- 
ings after the baptismal purity that is gone — their mournful 
contemplations of a soul that once glistened with baptismal 
dew, now " seamed and scarred " with the indelible marks of 
sin. 

The true Christian life is ever onward, full of trust and 
hope : a life wherein even past sin is no bar to saintliness, 
but the step by which you ascend to higher vantage-ground 
of holiness. The " indelible grace of baptism," how can it 
teach that? 

IL The second view is that held by what we, for the sake 
of avoiding personalities, call modem Calvinism. It draws 
a distinction between the visible and the invisible Church. 
It holds that baptism admits all into the former, but into the 
latter only a special few. Baptismal regeneration as applied 
to the first, is merely a change of state — though what is 
meant by a change of state it were hard to say, or to deter- 



272 Baptism, 

mine wherein an unbaptized person admitted to all the 
ordinances would differ in state from a person baptized. 
The real benefit of baptism, however, only belongs to the 
elect. With respect to others, to predicate of them regen- 
eration in the highest sense, is at best an ecclesiastical fic' 
tion, said " in the judgment of charity." 

This view maintains that you are not God's child until 
you become such consciously. Not until evidence of a re- 
generate life is given — not until si^^ns of a converted soul 
are shown, is it right to speak of bemg God's child, except 
in this judgment of charity. Now we remark, 

1. This judgment of charity ends at the baptismal font. 
It is never heard of in after-life. It is like the charitable 
judgment of the English law, which presumes, or is said to 
presume, a man innocent till proved guilty : valuable enough 
as a legal fiction ; nevertheless, it doe& not prevent a man 
barring his windows, guarding his purse, keenly watching 
against the dealings of those around him who are presumed 
innocent. Similarly, the so-called "judgment of charitv" 
terminates with infancy. They who speak of the Church's 
language, in which children are called children of God, as 
being quite right, but only in "the judgment of charity," 
are exactly the persons who do not in after-life charitably 
presume that all their neighbors are Christians. " He is not 
a Christian." " She is one of the world," or " one of the 
unregenerate." Such is the language applied to those who 
are in baptism reckoned children of God. They could not 
consistently apply to all adults the language applied in this 
text: "As many of you as have been baptized into Christ, 
have put on Christ. Ye are all the children of God by faith 
ir Christ Jesus." 

2. Next, I observe that this view is identical with the 
Roman one in this respect, that it creates the fact instead of 
testifying to it. Only, instead of baptism, it substitutes 
certain views, feelings, and impressions, and asserts that 
these make the man into a child of God. The Romanist says 
baptism, the Calvinist says faith, makes that true which was 
not true before. It is not a fact that God is that person's 
Father till in the one case baptism, in the other faith, have 
made him such. 

3. Observe the pernicious results of this teaching in the 
matter of education. Here, again, I draw the distinction 
between the practical consequences which legitimately ought 
to be, and those which actually are deduced from it. Hap- 
pily men are better than their views. Hear tlie man speak 
mg out of his theological system^ and then hear him speak 



Baptism, 273 

lug out of the abundance of his heart. Hear the religious 
mother when the system is in view, and all are indiscrimi- 
nately, except a certain few, corrupt, vile, with nothing good 
in them, heirs of ruin. But hear her talk unguardedly of 
her own children. They have the frailties, weaknesses, 
common faults of childhood ; but they have no vice in them : 
there is nothing base or degraded in her children ! When 
the embraces of her child are round her neck, it will require 
more eloquence than you possess to convince her that she is 
nursing a little demon in her lap. The heart of the mother 
is more than a match for the creed of the Calvinist. 

There are some, however, who do not shrink from con- 
sistency, and develop their doctrine in all its consequences. 
The children follow out their instructions with fearful fidelity. 
Taught that they are not the children of God till certain 
feelings have been developed in them, they become by de- 
grees bewildered, or else lose their footing on reality. They 
hear of certain mystic joys and sorrows ; and unless they 
fictitiously adopt the language they hear, they are painfully 
conscious that they know nothing of them as yet. They 
hear of a depression for sin which they certainly have never 
experienced — a joy in God, making His service and His 
house the gate of heaven ; and they know that it is excess- 
ively irksome to them — a confidence, trust, and assurance 
of which they know nothing — till they take for granted 
what has been told them, that they are not God's children. 
Tauirht that they are as yet of the world, they live as the 
world ; they carry out their education, which has dealt with 
them as children of the devil, to be converted ; and children 
of the devil they become. 

Of these two views, the last is by far the most certain to 
undermine Christianity in every Protestant country. The 
first at least assumes God's badge to be an universal one, 
and in education is so far right, practically : only wrong in 
the decision of the question how the child was created a 
child of God. But the second assumes a false, partial, party 
badge — election, views, feelings. No wonder that the chil- 
dren of such religionists proverbially turn out ill. 

HI. We pass to the doctrine of the Bible and (I believe) 
of the Church of England. 

Christ came to reveal a name — the Father. He abolished 
the exclusive " my," and He taught us to pray, " our Father." 
He proclaimed God the Father — man the Son : revealed that 
Vhe Son of Man is also the Son of God. Man, as man, God's 
child. He came to redeem the world" from that ignorancg 



274 Baptism. 

of the relationship which had left them in heart aliens and 
unregenerate. Human nature, therefore, became, viewed in 
Christ, a holy thing and divine. The revelation is a com- 
mon humanity, sanctified in God. The appearance of the 
Son of God is the sanctification of the human race. 

The development of this startled men. Sons of God ! 
Yes; ye Jews have monopolized it too long. Is that Samar- 
itan, heretic and alien, a child of God? Yes. The Samar- 
itan, but not these outcasts of society? Yes, these outcasts 
of society. He went into the publican's house and proclaim- 
ed that "he too was a son of Abraham." He suffered the 
sinful penitent to flood His feet with tears. He saw there 
the Eternal Light unquenched — the eye, long dimmed and 
darkened, which yet still could read the Eternal Mind. She, 
too, is God's erring, but forgiven, beloved, and "much-loving " 
child. One step farther. He will not dare to say — the Gen- 
tiles? — the Gentiles who bow down to stocks and stones? 
Yes, the Gentiles too. He spake to them a parable. He 
told of a younger son who had lived long away from his 
father's home. But his forgetfulness of his father could not 
abrogate the fact of his being his son, and as soon as he rec- 
ognized the relationship, all the blessings of it were his own. 

Now this is the revelation. Man is God's child, and the 
sin of the man consists in perpetually living as if it were 
false. It is the sin of the heathen, and what is your mission 
to him but to tell him that he is God's child, and not living 
up to his privilege ? It is the sin of the baptized Christian- 
waiting for feelings for a claim on God. It was the false life 
which the Jews had led : precisely this, that they were liv- 
ing coerced by law. Christ had come to redeem them from 
the law, that they might receive the adoption of sons. But 
they were sons already, if they only knew it. ^'•Bemuse ye 
are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your 
hearts, whereby ye cry Abba, Father." To be a son of God 
is one thing ; to know that you are, and call Him Father, is 
another — and that is regeneration. 

Now there was wanted a permanent and authoritative 
pledge, revealing and confirming this : for, to mankind in 
the mass, invisible truths become real only when they have 
been made visible. All spiritual facts must have an existence 
in form for the human mind to rest on. This pledge is bap- 
tism. Baptism is a visible witness to the world of that 
which the world is forever forgettini^. A common humanity 
united in God. Baptism authoritatively reveals and pledges 
to the individual that which is true of the race. Baptism 
takes the child and Uddresses it by name : Paul — no longer 



Baptism, 275 

Saul — you are a child of God. Remember it henceforth. 
It is now revealed to you, and recognized by you ; and to 
recognize God as the Father is to be regenerate. Tow, Paul, 
are now regenerate ; you will have foes to fight — the world, 
the flesh, and the devil : but remember, they only keep you 
out of an inheritance which is your own — not an inheritance 
which you have to win by some new feeling or merit in 
yourself. It is yours ; you are the child of God — you are 
a member of Christ — you are an inheritor of the kingdom of 
heaven. 

Observe then — baptism does not create a child of God. It 
authoritatively declares him so. It does not make the fact, 
it only reveals it. If baptism made it a fact then and there 
for the first time, baptism would be magic. Nay, faith does 
not create a child of God any more than baptism, nor does 
it make a fiict. It only appropriates that which is a fact al- 
ready. For otherwise see what inextricable confusion you 
fall into. You ask a man to believe, and thereby be created 
a child of God. Believe what — that God is his Father? 
But God is not his Father. He is not a child of God, you 
say, till he believes. Then you ask him to believe a lie. 

Herein lies the error, in basis identical, of the Romanist 
and the Calvinist. Faith is to one what baptism is to the 
other, the creator of a fact ; whereas they both rest upon a 
fact, which is a fact whether they exist or not — before they 
exist ; nay, without whose previous existence both of them 
are unmeaning and false. 

The Catechism, however, says : In baptism I was 

made a child of God. Yes, coronation makes a sovereign ; 
but, paradoxical as it may seem, it can only make one a 
sovereign who is a sovereign already. Crown a pretender, 
that coronation will not create the king. Coronation is the 
authoritative act of the nation declaring a fact which was 
fact before. And ever after coronation is the event to which 
all dates back, and the crown is the expression used for all 
royal acts : the crown pardons, the prerogatives of the 
crown, etc. 

Similarly with baptism. Baptism makes a child of God in 
the sense in which coronation makes a king. And baptism 
naturally stands in Scripture for the title of regeneration and 
the moment of it. Only what coronation is in an earthly way, 
an authoritative manifestation of an invisible earthly truth, 
baptism is in a heavenly way : God's authoritative declara- 
tion in material form of a spiritual reality. In other words, 
no bare sign, but a Divine sacrament. 

Now for the blessino^s of this view. 



276 Baptism. 

1. It prevents exclusiveness and spiritual pride, and all 
condemnation and contempt of others ; for it admits those 
who have no spiritual capacity or consciousness to be God's 
children. It proclaims a kingdom, not for a few favorites, 
but for mankind. It protests against the idea that sonship 
depends on feelings. It asserts it as a broad, grand, uni- 
versal, blessed fact. It bids you pray with a meaning of 
added majesty in the words. Our Father. 

Take care. Do not say of others that they are unregener- 
ate, of the world. Do not make a distinction within the 
Church of Christians and not-Christians. If you do, what do 
you more than the Pharisees of old ? That wretched beggar 
that holds his hat at the crossing of the street is God's child 
as well as you, if he only knew it. You know it — he does 
not : that is the difference. But the immortal is in him too, 
and the Eternal Word speaks in him. That daughter of dis- 
sipation whom you despise, spending night after night in 
frivolity, she too has a Father in heaven. " My Father and 
yoitr Father, my God and your God." She has forgotten 
Him, and, like the prodigal, is trying to live on the husks of 
the world — the empty husks which will not satisfy — the de- 
grading husks which the swine did eat. But whether she 
will or not, her baptism is valid, and proclaims a fact — which 
may be, alas ! the worse for her, if she will not have it the 
better. 

2. This doctrine protests against the notion of our being 
separate units in the Divine life. The Church of Calvinism 
is merely a collection of atoms, a sand-heap piled together, 
with no cohesion among themselves, or a mass of steel filings 
cleaving separately to a magnet, but not to each other. 
Baptism proclaims a church. Humanity joined in Christ to 
God. Do not say that the separating work of baptism, 
drawing a distinction between the Church and the world, 
negatives this. Do not say, that because the Church is sep- 
arated from the world, therefore the world are not God's 
children. Rather that very separation proves it. You bap- 
tize a separate body, in order to realize that which is true of 
the collective race, as in this text, "There is neither Jew nor 
Greek." In all things it is the same. If you would sanctify 
all time, you set apart a sabbath — not to show that other 
days are not intended to be sacred, but for the very purpose 
of making them sacred. If }^ou would have a "nation of 
priests," you set apart a priesthood ; not as if the priestly 
functions of instruction and assisting to approach God were 
exclusively in that body, but in order, by concentration, to 
bring out to greater perfection t]ie priestly character which 



Baptism. 277 

ig shared by the whole, and then thereby make the whole 
more truly " priests to God to offer spiritual sacrifices." In 
the same way, if God would baptize humanity. He baptizes 
a separate Church, in order that that Church may baptize 
the race. The Church is God's ideal of humanity realized. 

Lastly, This doctrine of baptism sanctifies materialism. 
The Romanist was feeling his way to a great fact when he 
said that there are other things of sacramental efficacy be- 
sides these two — Baptism and the Supper of the Lord. The 
things of earth are pledges and sacraments of tilings in heav- 
en. It is not for nothing that God has selected for His sac- 
raments the commonest of all acts — a meal, and the most 
abundant of all materials — water. Think you that He 
means to say that only through two channels His Spirit 
streams into the soul ? Or is it not much more in unison 
with His dealings to say that these two are set apart to sig- 
nify to us the sacramental character of all nature ? Just as 
a miracle was intended not to reveal God working there, at 
that death-bed and in that storm, but to call attention to His 
presence in every death and every storm. Go out at this 
spring season of the year ; see the mighty preparations for 
life that N^ature is making ; feel the swelling sense of grate- 
fulness, and the pervasive expanding consciousness of love 
for all Being ; and then say, whether this whole form which 
we call nature is not the great Sacrament of God, the rev- 
elation of His existence, and the channel of His communica- 
tions to the spirit ? 



IV. 
BAPTISM. 

"The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save ns." — 1 
Peter ill. 21. 

Last Sunday we considered the subject of baptism in ref- 
erence to the Romish and modern Calvinistic views. The 
truth seemed to lie not in a middle course between the two 
extremes, but in a truth deeper than either of them. For 
there are various modifications of the Romish view which 
soften down its repulsive features. There are some who hold 
that the guilt of original sin is pardoned, but the tendencies 
of an evil nature remain ; others who attribute a milder 
meaning to " regeneration," understanding by it a change of 
state instead of a change of nature ; others who acknowledge 



278 Baptism, 

a certain my^erious benefit imparted by baptism, but decline 
determining how much grace is given, or what the exact na- 
ture of the blessing is ; others who acknowledge that it is in 
certain cases the moment w^hen regeneration takes place, but 
hold that it is conditional, occurring sometimes, not always, 
and following upon the condition of what they call " preven- 
ient grace." We do not touch upon these views. They are 
simply modifications of the Romish view, and as such, more 
ofiensive than the view itself; for they contain that which is 
most objectionable in it, and special evils of their own besides. 

We admitted the merits of the two views. We are grate- 
ful to the Romanist for the testimony which he bears to the 
truth of the extent of Christ's salvation — for the privilege 
which he gives of calling all the baptized, children of God — 
for the protest w^hich his doctrine makes against all party 
monopoly of God — for the protest against ultra-spiritualism, 
in acknowledging that material things are the types and 
channels of the Almighty Presence. 

We are grateful to the Calvinist for his strong protest 
against formalism — for his assertion of the necessity of an in- 
w^ard change — for the distinction which he has drawn be- 
tween being in the state of sons, and having the nature of 
sons of God. 

The errar in these two systems, contrary as they are, ap- 
peared to us to be identically one and the same — that of pre- 
tendintr to create a fact instead of witnessins; to it. The Cal- 
vinist maintains that on a certain day and hour, under the 
ministry of the Word, under the preaching of some one who 
" proclaims the Gospel," he was born again, and God became 
his Father; and the Romanist declares that on a certain day, 
at a certain moment by an earthly clock, by the hands of a 
priest apostolically ordained, the evil nature was expelled 
from him, and a new fact in the world was created — he at- 
tained the right of calling God his Father. 

Now if baptism makes God our Father, baptism is incan- 
tation; if faith makes him so, faith rests upon a falsehood. 

For the Romanist does no more than the red Indian and 
the black negro pretend to do — exorcise the devil, and infuse 
God. The only question then becomes. Which is the true 
enchanter, and which is the impostor? for the juggler does, 
by the power of imagination, often cure the sick man ; but 
the mysterious effects of baptism never are visible, and never 
can be tested in this world. 

On the other hand, faith would rest upon a falsehood : for 
if faith is to give the right of calling God a Father, how can 
you believe that which is not true the very moment before 



Baptism, 279 

belief? God is not your Father. If you believe He is, your 
belief is false. 

The truth which underlies these two views, on which all 
that is true in them rests, and in which all that is false is aV 
Borbed, is the paternity of God. This is the revelation of the 
Redeemer. This is authoritatively declared by baptism, ap- 
propriated personally by faith, but a truth independent both 
of baptism and faith — which would still be true if there were 
neither a baptism nor a faith in the world. They are the 
witnesses of the fact — not the creators of it. 

Here, however, two difficulties arise. If this be so, do we 
not make light of Original Sin? And do we not reduce bap- 
tism into a superfluous ceremony ? 

Before we enter upon these questions, I must vindicate my- 
self from the appearance of presumption. Where the wisest 
and holiest have held opposite views, it seems immodest to 
speak with unfaltering certainty and decisive tone. Hesita- 
tion, guarded statements, caution, it would seem, would be 
far more in place. . Now, to speak decidedly, is not, necessa- 
rily, to speak presumptuously. There are questions involv- 
ing great research, and questions relating to truths beyond 
our ken, where guarded and uncertain tones are only a duty. 
There are others where the decision has become conviction, 
a*kind of intuition, the result of years of thought, which has 
been the day to a man's darkness, "the fountain-light of all 
his seeing," which has interpreted him to himself, made all 
clear where all was perplexed before, been the key to the rid- 
dle of truths that seemed contradictory, become part of his 
very being, and for which more than once he has held him- 
self cheerfully prepared to sacrifice all that is commonly held 
dear. With respect to convictions such as these, of course, 
the arguments by which they are enforced may be faulty, the 
illustrations inadequate, the power of making them intelligi- 
ble very feeble ; nay, the views themselves may be wrong ; 
but to pretend to speak with hesitation and uncertainty re- 
specting such convictions would be not modesty, but affec- 
tation. 

For let us remember in what spirit we are to enter on this 
inquiry. Not in the spirit of mere cautious orthodoxy, en- 
deavoring to find a safe mean between two extremes — in- 
quiring what is the view held by the sound, and judicious, 
and respectable men, who were never found guilty of any en- 
thusiasm, and under the shelter of whose opinion we may be 
secure from the charge of any thing unsound ; nor in the 
spirit of the lawyer, patiently examining documents, weigh- 
ing evidence, and deciding whether upon sufficient testimony 



28o Baptism. 

there is such a thing as " prevenieiit grace " or not ; nor, 
once more, in the spirit of superstition. The supei-stitious 
mother of the lower classes baptizes her child in all haste be- 
cause she believes it has a mystic influence on its health, or 
because she fancies that it confers the name without which it 
would not be summoned at the day of judgment. And the 
superstitious mother of the upper classes baptizes her child 
too in all haste, because, though she does not precisely know 
what the mystic effect of baptism is, she thinks it best to be 
on the safer side, lest her child should die, and its eternity 
should be decided by the omission. And we go to preach to 
the heathen while there are men and women in our Christian 
England so bewildered with systems and sermons, so pro- 
foundly in the dark respecting the Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, so utterly unable to repose in eternal love and justice, 
that they must guard their child from Him by a ceremony, 
and have the shadow of a shade of doubt whether or not, for 
omission of theirs, that child's Creator and Father may curse 
its soul for all eternity ! 

We are to enter upon this question as a real one of life 
and death — as men who feel in their bosoms sin and death, 
and who want to determine no theological nicety, but this : 
Whether we have a right to claim to be sons of God or not ? 
And if so, on what grounds? In virtue of a ceremon}^, or in 
virtue of a certain set of feelings ? Or in virtue of an eternal 
fact — the fact of God's paternity ? 

I reply to two objections. 

I. The apparent denial of original sin. 
II. The apparent result that baptism is nothing. 

I. The text selected is a strong and distinct one. It pro- 
claims the value of baptism. " Baptism scwes us." But it 
declares that it can only be said figuratively: "The like fig- 
ure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us." 

Now the first reply I make is, that in truth the Romish 
view seems to make lighter of original sin than this. Me- 
thinks original sin must be a trifling thing if a little water 
and a few human words can do away with it. A trifling 
thing if, after it is done away, there is no distinguishable dif- 
ference between the baptized and unbaptized ; if the unbap- 
tized Quaker is just as likely to exhibit the fruits of goodness 
as the baptized son of the Church of England. We have got 
out of the land of reality into the domain of figments and 
speculations. A fictitious guilt is done away with by a fic- 
titious pardon, neither the appearance nor the disappearance 
being visible. 



Baptism, 281 

Original sin is an awful fact. It is not the guilt of an an- 
cestor imputed to an innocent descendant, but it is the ten- 
dencies of that ancestor living in his offspring and incurring 
guilt. Original sin can be forgiven only so far as original 
sin is removed. It is not Adam's, it is yours ; and it must 
cease to be yours, or else what is " taking away original sin ?" 

Now he who would deny original sin must contradict all 
experience in the transmission of qualities. The very hound 
transmits his peculiarities learnt by education, and the Span- 
ish horse his paces, taught by art, to his offspring, as a part 
of their nature. If it were not so in man, there could be no 
history of man as a species — no tracing out the tendencies 
of a race or nation — nothing but the unconnected repetitions 
of isolated individuals and their lives. It is plain that the 
first man must have exerted on his race an influence quite 
peculiar — that his acts must have biased their acts. And 
this bias or tendency is what we call original sin. 

Now original sin is just this denial of God's paternity, re- 
fusing to live as His children, and saying we are not His chil- 
dren. To live as His child is the true life — to live as not His 
child is the false life. What was the Jews' crime ? Was it 
not this : " He came unto His own, and His own received 
him not :" that they were His own, and in act denied it, pre- 
ferring to the claim of spiritual relationship, the claim of 
union by circumcision or hereditary descent ? What was the 
crime of the Gentiles ? Was it not this : that " when they 
knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were 
thankful?" For what were they to be thankful? For being 
His enemies? Were they not His children, His sheep of 
another fold? Was not the whole falsehood of their life the 
worship of demons and nothings instead of Him ? Did not 
the parable represent them as the younger son — a wanderer 
from home, but still a son ? 

From this state Christ redeemed. He revealed God not 
as the mechanic of the universe, not the judge, but as the 
Father, and as the Spirit who is in man, " lighting every man," 
moving in man his infinite desires and infinite affections. 
This was the revelation. The reception of that revelation is 
regeneration. " He came unto His own, and His own received 
Him not ; but to as many as received Him to them gave He 
power to become the sons of God, even to as many as be- 
lieved on His name." They toere His own, yet they wanted 
power to become His own. 

Draw a distinction, therefore, between being the child of 
God and realizing it. The fact is one thing ; the feeling of 
the fact, and the life which results from that feeling, is anoth- 



282 Baptism, 

er. Redemption is the taking of us out of the life of false- 
hood into the life 01 truth and fact. " Of His own will begat 
He us by the word of truth." But, remember, it is a truth; 
true whether you believe it or not; true whether you are 
baptized or not. 

There are two ways in which that revelation may be ac- 
cepted. 1. By a public recognition called baptism. 2. By 
faith. In two ways, therefore, may it be said that man is 
saved. " We are saved by faith." But it is also true, figu- 
ratively, "Baptism saves us." 

n. If baptism is only the public recognition and symbol 
of a fact, is not baptism degraded and made superfluous ? 

1. Baptism is given as a something to rest upon; nay, as a 
something without which redemption would soon become 
unreal — which converts a doctrine into a reality — which re- 
alizes visibly what is invisible. 

For our nature is such, that immaterial truths are unreal 
to us until they are embodied in material form. Form al- 
most gives them reality and being. For instance, time is an 
eternal fact. But time only exists to our conceptions as an 
actuality by measurements of materialism. When God cre- 
ated the sun, and moon, and stars, to serve for " signs and for 
seasons, and for days and years," He was actually, so far as 
man was concerned, creating time. Our minds would be 
only floating in an eternal Now, if it were not for symbolical 
successions which represent the processes of thought. The 
clock in the house is almost a fresh creation. It realizes. 
The gliding heavens, and the seasons, and the ticking clock — 
what is time to us without them ? Nothing. 

God's character, again, nay, God Himself, to us would be 
nothing if it were not for the creation, which is the great 
symbol and sacrament of His presence. If there w^ere no 
light, no sunshine, no sea, no national and domestic life, no 
material witness of His being, God Avould be to us as good 
as lost. The Creation gives us God : forever real in Himself, 
by Creation He becomes a fact to us. 

It is in virtue, again, of this necessity in man for an out« 
ward symbol to realize an invisible idea, that a bit of torn 
and blacken^ed rag hanging from a fortress or the tafi*rail of 
a ship, is a kind of life to iron-hearted men. Why is it that 
in the heat of battle there is one spot whore the sabres flash 
most rapidly, and the pistols' ring is quicker, and men and 
officers close in most densely, and all are gathered round one 
man, round whose body that tattered silk is wound, and held 
with the tenacity of a death-struggle? Arc they only chil- 



Baptism, 283 

dren fighting for a bit of rag? That flag is every thing to 
them : their regiment, their country, their honor, their life ; 
yet it is only a symbol ! Are symbols nothing ? 

In the same way, baptism is a fact for man to rest upon, 
a doctrine realized to flesh and blood. A something in eter- 
nity which has no place in time brought down to such time 
expressions as " then and there." 

2. Again, baptism is the token of a church : the token of 
an universal church. Observe the importance of its being 
the sacrament of an universal church instead of the symbol 
of a sect. Not episcopacy, not justification by faith, nor any 
party badge, but " one baptism." How blessed, on the 
strength of this, to be able to say ta the baptized dissenter, 
You are my brother : you anathematize my church — link 
Popery and Prelacy together — malign me ; but the same 
sign is on our brow, and the same Father was named over 
our baptism. Or to say to a baptized Romanist, You are my 
brother too — in doctrinal error perhaps — in error of life it 
may be too : but my brother — our enemies the same — our 
struggle the same — our hopes and warfare the very same. 
Or to the very outcast, And you, my poor degraded friend, 
are my brother still — sunk, oblivious of your high calling ; 
but still, whatever keeps you away from heaven keeps you 
from your own. You may live the false life till it is too 
late : but still, you only exclude yourself from your home. 
Of course this is very ofiensive. What ! the Romanist my 
brother ! the synagogue of Satan the house of God ! the 
Spirit of God dwelling with the Church of Rome ! the be- 
liever in transubstantiation my brother, and God's child ! 
Yes, even so ; and it is just your forgetfulness of what bap- 
tism is and means, that accounts for that indignation of 
yours. Do you remember what the elder brother in the par- 
able was doing ? He went away sulky and gloomy, because 
one not half so good as himself was recognized as his father's 
child. 

3. Baptism is seen to be no mere superfluity when you re- 
member that it is an authoritative symbol. Draw the dis- 
tinction between an arbitrary symbol and an authoritative 
one — for this diflerence is every thing. 

I take once again the illustration of the coronation act. 
Coronation places the crown on the brow of one who is sov- 
ereign. It does not make the fact, it witnesses it. Is cor- 
onation therefore nothing ? An arbitrary symbolical act 
agreed on by a few friends of the sovereign would be noth- 
ing ; but an act which is the solemn ratification of a country 
is every thing. It realizes a fact scarcely till then felt to be 



284 Baptism. 

real. Yet the fact was fact before — otherwise the coronation 
would be invalid. Even when the third William was crown- 
ed, there was the symbol of a previous fact^the nation's de- 
cree that he should be king : and accordingly, ever after, all 
is dated back to that. You talk of crown-prerogatives. You 
say in your loyalty you " would bow to the crown, though it 
hung upon a bush." Yet it is only a symbol ! You only 
say it " in a figure." But that figure contains within it the 
royalty of England. 

In a figure, the Bible speaks of baptism as you speak of 
coronation, as identical with that which it proclaims. It 
calls it regeneration. It says baptism saves. A grand fig- 
ure, because it rests upon eternal fact. Call you that noth- 
ing ? 

We look to the Bible to corroborate this. In the Acts of 
the Apostles Cornelius is baptized. On what grounds ? To 
manufacture him into a child of God, or because he was the 
child of God ? Did his baptism create the fact, or was the 
fact prior to his baptism, and the ground on which his bap- 
tism was valid ? The history is this : St. Peter could not be- 
lieve that a Gentile could be a child of God. But miracu- 
lous phenomena manifested to his astonishment that this Gen- 
tile actually was God's child — whereupon the argument of 
Peter was very natural. He has the Spirit, therefore baptism 
is superfluous. Nay, he has the Spirit, therefore give him the 
symbol of the Spirit. Let it be revealed to others what he is. 
He is heir to the inheritance, therefore give him the title- 
deeds. He is of royal lineage — put the crown upon his head. 
He is a child of God — baptize him. " Who shall forbid wa- 
ter, seeing these have received the Holy Ghost as well as 
we?" 

One illustration more from the marriage ceremony ; and I 
select this for two reasons : because it is the type in Scrip- 
ture of the union between Christ and his Church, and because 
the Church ot Rome has called it a sacrament. 

A deep truth is in that error. Rome calls it a sacrament, 
because it is the authoritative symbol of an invisible fact. 
That invisible fact is the agreement of two human beings to 
be one. We deny it to be a sacrament, because, though it is 
the symbol of an invisible fact, it is not the symbol of a spir- 
itual fact, nor an eternal fact : no spiritual truth, but only a 
changeful human covenant. 

Now observe the diflerence between an arbitrary or con- 
ventional, and an authoritative ceremony of marriage-union. 
There are conventional acknowledgments of that agreement, 
ceremonies peculiar to certain districts, private pledges, be- 



Baptism. 285 

trothals. la the sight of God those aro valid ; they can not 
be lightly broken without sin. You can not in the courts of 
heaven distinguish between an oath to God and a word 
pledged to man. He said, "Let your yea be yea, and your 
nay, nay." Such an engagement can not be infringed with- 
out penalty — the penalty of frivolized hearts, and that habit 
of changefulness of attachment which is the worst of penal- 
ties. But now, additional to that, will any one say that the 
marriage ceremony is superfluous — that the ring he gives his 
wife is nothing ? It is every thing. It is the authoritative 
ratification by a country and before God of that which be- 
fore was for all purposes of earth unreal. Authoritative — 
therein lies the diff*erence. Just in that authoritativeness 
lies the question whether the ceremony is nothing or every 
thing. 

And yet remember, the ceremony itself does not pretenct 
to create the fact. It only claims to realize the fact. It ad> 
mits the fact as existing previously. It bases itself upon a 
fact. Forasmuch as two persons have consented together, 
and forasmuch as a token and pledge of that in the shape 
of a ring has been given, therefore, only therefore, the ap- 
pointed minister pronounces that they are what betrothal 
had made them already in the sight of God. 

Exactly so, the author itatweness is the all in all which 
converts baptism from a mere ceremony into a sacrament. 
Baptism is not merely a conventional arrangement, exceed- 
ingly convenient, agreed on by men to remind themselves 
and one another that they are God's children, but valid as a 
legal, eternal truth, a condensed, embodied fact. 

Is this making baptism nothing ? I should rather say 
baptism is every thing. Baptism saves us. 

One word now practically. I address myself to any one 
who is conscious of fault, sin-laden, struggling with the ter- 
rible question whether he has a right to claim God as his Fa- 
ther or not, bewildered on the one side by Romanism, on the 
other by Calvinism. My brother, let not either of these rob 
you of your privileges. Let not Rome send you to the fear- 
ful questioning as to whether the mystic seed infused at a 
certain moment by an act of man remains in you still, oJ 
whether it has been so impaired by sin that henceforth there 
is nothing but penance, tears, and uncertainty until the grave. 
Let not Calvinism send you with terrible self-inspection to 
the more dreadful task of searching your own soul for the 
warrant of your redemption, and deciding whether you have 
or have not the feelings and the faith which give you a 
right to be one of God's elect. Better make up your minCl 



286 Elijah, 

at once you have not ; you have no feelings that entitle you 
to that. Take your stand upon the broader, sublimer basis 
of God's paternity. God created the world — God redeemed 
the world. Baptism proclaims separately, personally, by 
name, to you — God created you, God redeemed you. Bap- 
tism is your warrant, you are His child. And now, because 
you are His child, live as a child of God ; be redeemed from 
the life of evil, which is false to your nature, into the life of 
light and goodness, which is the truth of your being. Scorn 
all that is mean ; hate all that is false ; struggle with all that 
is impure. Love whatsoever " things are true, whatsoever 
things are just, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever 
things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report," 
certain that God is on your side, and that whatever keeps 
you from Him, keeps you from your own Father. Live the 
simple, lofty life which befits an heir of immortalityo 



V. 

ELIJAH. 

" But he himself went a day's jouraey into the wilderness, and came and 
sat do\vn under a juniper-tree : and he requested for himself that he might 
die ; and said, It is enough ; now, O Lord, take away my hfe ; for I am not 
better than my fathers," — 1 Kings xix, 4. 

It has been observed of the holy men of Scripture that 
their most signal failures took place in those points of char- 
acter for which they were remarkable in excellence. Moses 
was the meekest of men, but it was Moses who " spake un- 
advisedly with his lips." St. John was the apostle of chari- 
ty ; yet he is the very type to us of religious intolerance, in 
his desire to call down fire from heaven. St. Peter is pro- 
verbially the apostle of impetuous intrepidity, yet twice he 
proved a craven. If there were any thing for which Elijah is 
remarkable, we should say it was superiority to human weak- 
ness. Like the Baptist, he dared to arraign and rebuke his 
sovereign ; like the commander who cuts down the bridge 
behind him, leaving himself no alternative but death or vic- 
tory, he taunted his adversaries the priests of Baal, on Mount 
Carmel, making them gnash their teeth and cut themselves 
with knives, but at the same time insuring for himself a ter- 
rible end, in case of fiiilure, from liis exasperated foes. And 
again, in his last hour, when he was on his way to a strange 
and unprecedented departure from this world — when th j 



Elijah, 287 

V/hiiiWind and flame-chariot were ready, he asked for no hu- 
man companionship. The bravest men are pardoned if one 
lingering feeling of human weakness clings to them at the 
last, and they desire a human eye resting on them — a human 
hand in theirs — a human presence with them. But Elijah 
would have rejected all. In harmony with the rest of his 
.lonely severe character, he desired to meet his Creator 
alone. Now it was this man — so stern, so iron, so independ- 
ent, so above all human weakness — of whom it was record- 
ed that in his trial-hour he gave way to a fit of petulance and 
querulous despondency to which there is scarcely found a 
parallel. Religious despondency, therefore, is our subject 

I. The causes of Elijah's despondency. 
IL God's treatment of it. 

The causes of Elijah's despondency. 

1. Relaxation of physical strength. 

On the reception of Jezebel's message, Elijah flies for his 
life — toils on the whole day — sits down under a juniper-tree, 
faint, hungry, and travel-worn ; the gale of an Oriental even- 
ing, damp and heavy with languid sweetness, breathing on 
his face. The prophet and the man give way. He longs to 
die : you can not mistake the presence of causes in part 
purely physical. 

We are fearfully and wonderfully made. Of that consti^ 
tution which in our ignorance we call union of soul and body, 
we know little respecting what is cause and what is efi*ect. 
"We would fain believe that the mind has power over the 
body, but it is just as true that the body rules the mind. 
Causes apparently the most trivial : a heated room — want of 
exercise — a sunless day — a northern aspect — will make all 
the difference between happiness and unhappiness, between 
faith and doubt, between courage and indecision. To our 
fancy there is something humiliating in being thus at the 
mercy of our animal organism. We would fain find nobler 
causes for our emotions. We talk of the hiding of God's 
countenance, and the fiery darts of Satan. But the picture 
given here is true. The body is the channel of our noblest 
emotions as well as our sublimest sorrows. 

Two practical results follow. First, instead of vilifying 
the body, complaining that our nobler part is chained down 
to a base partner, it is worth recollecting that the body too 
is the gift of God, in its way Divine — " the temple of the 
Holy Ghost ;" and that to keep the body in temperance, so- 
berness, and chastity, to guard it from pernicious influence, 
and to obey the laws of health, are just as much religious as 



288 Elijah, 

they are moral duties ; just as much obligatory on the ChriS" 
£ian as they are on a member of a Sanitary Committee. 
Next, there are persons melancholy by constitution, in whom 
the tendency is incurable ; you can not exorcise the phantom 
of despondency. But it is something to know that it is a 
phantom, and not to treat it as a reality — something taught 
by Elijah's history, if we only learn from it to be patient, and 
wait humbly the time and good pleasure of God. 

2. Want of sympathy. 

" I, even I only, am left." Lay the stress on only. The 
loneliness of his position was shocking to Elijah. Surprising 
this : for Elijah wanted no sympathy in a far harder trial on 
Mount Carmel. It was in a tone of triumph that he pro- 
claimed that he was the single, solitary prophet of the Lord, 
while Baal's prophets were four hundred and fifty men. 

Observe, however, the difierence. There was in that case 
an opposition which could be grappled with : here there was 
nothing against which mere manhood was availing. The 
excitement was passed, the chivalrous look of the thing 
gone. To die as a martyr, yes, that were easy, in grand fail- 
ure ; but to die as a felon — to be hunted, caught, taken back 
to an ignominious death — flesh and blood recoiled from that. 

And Elijah began to feel that popularity is not love. The 
world will support you when you have constrained its votes 
by a manifestation of power, and shrink from you when pow- 
er and greatness are no longer on your side. "I, even 1 
only, am left." 

This trial is most distinctly realized by men of Elijah's 
stamp and placed under Elijah's circumstances. It is the 
penalty paid by superior mental and moral qualities, that 
such men must make up their minds to live without sympa- 
thy. Their feelings will be misunderstood, and their proj- 
ects uncomprehended. They must be content to live alone. 
It is sad to hear such appeal from the present to the judg- 
ment of the future. Poor consolation! Elijah has been 
judged at that bar. We are his posterity : our reverence 
this day is the judgment of posterity on him. But to Elijah 
what is that now? Elijah is in that quiet country where 
the voice of praise and the voice of blame are alike unheard. 
Elijah lived and died alone; once only the bitterness of it 
found expression. But what is posthumous justice to the 
heart that ached then f 

What greater minds like Elijah's have felt intensely, all 
we have felt in our own degree. Not one of us but what 
has felt his heart aching for want of sympathy. We liave 
had our lonely hours, our days of disappointment, and our 



Elijah 289 

moments of hopelessness — times when our highest feelings 
have been misunderstood, and our purest met with ridicule. 
Days when our heavy secret was lying unshared, like ice 
upon the heart. And then the spirit gives way : we have 
wished that all were over — that we could lie down tired, 
and rest like the children, from life — that the hour was come 
when we could put down the extinguisher on the lamp, and 
feel the last grand rush of darkness on the spirit. 

Now, the final cause of this capacity for depression, the 
reason for which it is granted us, is that it may make God 
lecessary. In such moments it is felt that sympathy be- 
yond human is needful. Alone, the world against him, Eli- 
jah turns to God. " It is enough : now, JLordy 

3. Want of occupation. 

As long as Elijah had a prophet's work to do, severe as 
that work was, all went on healthily ; but his occupation 
was gone. To-morrow and the day after, what has he left 
on earth to do ? The misery of having nothing to do pro- 
ceeds from causes voluntary or involuntary in their nature. 
Multitudes of our race, by circumstances over which they 
have no control — in single life or widowhood — in straitened 
circumstances — are compelled to endure lonely days, and 
still more lonely nights and evenings. They who have felt 
the hours hang so heavy can comprehend part of Elijah's 
sadness. 

This misery, however, is sometimes voluntarily incurred. 
In artificial civilization certain persons exempt themselves 
from the necessity of work. They eat the bread which has 
been procured by the sweat of the brow of others — they 
skim the surface of the thought which has been ploughed by 
the sweat of the brain of others. They are reckoned the fa- 
vored ones of fortune, and envied. Are they blessed ? The 
law of life is, in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread. 
No man can evade that law with impunity. Like all God's 
laws, it is its own executioner. It has strange penalties an- 
nexed to it : would you know them ? Go to the park, or the 
esplanade, or the solitude after the night of dissipation, and 
read the penalties of being useless, in the sad, jaded, listless 
countenances — nay, in the very trifles which must be con- 
trived to create excitement artificially. Yet these very eyes 
could, dull as they are, beam with intelligence : on many of 
those brows is stamped the mark of possible nobility. The 
fact is, that the capacity of ennui is one of the signatures of 
man's immortality. It is his very greatness which makes in- 
action misery. If God had made us only to be insects, with 
no nobler care incumbent on u« than the preservation of our 



^q6 PAijah, 

lives, or the pursuit of happiness, we might be content to 
flutter from sweetness to sweetness, and from bud to flower. 
But if men with souls live only to eat and drink and be 
amused, is it any wonder if life be darkened with despond- 
ency ? 

4. Disappointment in the expectation of success. 

On Carmel the great object for which Elijah in? lived 
seemed on the point of being realized. Baal's prophets were 
slain — Jehovah acknowledged with one voice — false worship 
put down. Elijah's life- aim, the transformation of Israel into 
a kingdom of God, was all but accomplished. In a single 
day all this bright picture was annihilated. 

Man is to desire success, but success rarely comes. The 
wisest has written upon life its sad epitaph — " All is vanity," 
i. e., nothingness. 

The tradesman sees the noble fortune for which he lived, 
every coin of which is the representative of so much time 
and labor spent, squandered by a spendthrift son. The 
purest statesmen find themselves at last neglected, and re- 
warded by defeat. Almost never can a man look back on 
life and say that its anticipations have been realized. For 
the most part life is disappointment, and the moments in 
which this is keenly realized are moments like this of 
Elijah's. 

II. God's treatment of it. 

1. First He recruited His servant's exhausted strength. 
Read the history. Miraculous meals are given — then Elijah 
sleeps, wakes, and eats : on the strength of that goes forty 
days' journey. In other words, like a wise physician, God 
administers food, rest, and exercise, and then, and not till 
then, proceeds to expostulate; for before, Elijah's mind was 
unfit for reasoning. 

Persons come to the ministers of God in seasons of de- 
spondency ; they pervert with marv^ellous ingenuity all the 
consolation which is given them, turning wholesome food 
into poison. Then we begin to perceive the wisdom of 
God's simple homely treatment of Elijah, and discover that 
there are spiritual cases which are cases for the physician 
rather than the divine. 

2. Next Jehovah calmed his stormy mind by the healing 
influences of Nature. He commanded the hurricane to 
sweep the sky, and the earthquake to shake the ground. 
He lighted up the heavens till they were one mass of fire. 
All this expressed and reflected Elijah's feelings. The mode 
in which Nature soothes us is by finding meeter and no* 



Elijah. 291 

blei utterance for our feelings than we can find in words — 
by expressing and exalting them. In expression there is re- 
lief. Elijah's spirit rose with the spirit of the storm. Stern, 
wild defiance — strange joy — all by turns were imaged there. 
Observe, " God was not in the wind," nor in the fire, nor in 
the earthquake. It was Elijah's stormy self reflected in the 
moods of the tempest, and giving them their character. 

Then came a calmer hour. Elijah rose in reverence — felt 
tenderer sensations in his bosom. He opened his heart to 
gentler influences, till at last out of the manifold voices of 
Nature there seemed to speak, not the stormy passions of 
the man, but the "still small voice" of the harmony and the 
peace of God. 

There are some spirits which must go through a discipline 
analogous to that sustained by Elijah. The storm-struggle 
must precede the still small voice. There are minds which 
must be convulsed with doubt before they can repose in 
faith. There are hearts which must be broken with disap- 
pointment before they can rise into hope. There are dispo- 
sitions which, like Job, must have all things taken from them 
before they can find all things again in God. Blessed is the 
man who, when the tempest has spent its fury, recognizes his 
Father's voice in its under-tone, and bares his head and bows 
his knee, as Elijah did. To such spirits, generally those of a 
stern rugged cast, it seems as if God had said, " In the still 
sunshine and ordinary ways of life you can not meet Me, but 
like Job, in the desolation of the tempest, you shall see My 
form, and hear My voice, and know that your Redeemer 
liveth." 

3. Besides, God made him feel the earnestness of life. 
"What doest thou here, Elijah ? Life is for doing. A proph- 
et's life for nobler doing — and the prophet was not doing, 
but moaning. 

Such a voice repeats itself to all of us, rousing us from our 
lethargy, or our despondency, or our protracted leisure, 
" What doest thou here ?" here in this short life. There is 
work to be done — evil put down — God's Church purified — ■ 
good men encouraged — doubting men directed — a country 
to be saved — time going — life a dream — eternity long — one 
chance, and but one forever. What doest thou here ? 

Then he went on farther : "Arise, go on thy way." That 
speaks to us : on thy way. Be up and doing ; fill up every 
hour, leaving no crevice or craving for a remorse, or a re- 
pentance to creep through afterwards. Let not the mind 
brood on self; save it from speculation, from those stagnant 
moments in which the awful teachings of the spirit grope 



292 Elijah, 

into the unfathomable unknown, and the heart torments it* 
Belf with questions which are insoluble except to an active 
life. For the awful Future becomes intelligible only in the 
light of a felt and active Present. Go, return on thy way if 
thou art desponding — on thy way ; health of spirit will re- 
turn. 

4. He completed the cure by the assurance of victory.' 
" Yet have I left me seven thousand in Israel who have not 
bowed the knee to Baal." So, then, Elijah's life had been no 
failure after all. Seven thousand at least in Israel had been 
braced and encouraged by his example, and silently blessed 
him, perhaps, for the courage which they felt. In God's 
world for those that are in earnest there is no failure. No 
work truly done — no word earnestly spoken — no sacrifice 
freely made, was ever made in vain. Never did the cup of 
cold water given for Christ's sake lose its reward. 

We turn naturally from this scene to a still darker hour 
and more august agony. If ever failure seemed to rest on a 
noble life, it was when the Son of Man, deserted by His 
friends, heard the cry which proclaimed that the Pharisees 
had successfully drawn the net round their Divine victim. 
Yet from that very hour of defeat and death there went 
forth the world's life — from that very moment of apparent 
failure there proceeded forth into the ages the spirit of the 
conquering Cross. Surely if the Cross says any thing, it 
says that apparent defeat is real victory, and that there is a 
heaven for those who have nobly and truly failed on earth. 

Distinguish, therefore, between the real and the apparent. 
Elijah's apparent success was in the shouts of Mount Carmel. 
His real success was in the unostentatious, unsurmised obe- 
dience of the seven thousand who had taken his God for 
their God. 

This is a lesson for all : for teachers who lay their heads 
down at night sickening over their thankless task. Remem- 
ber the power oi indirect influences: those which distill from 
a life, not from a sudden, brilliant efibrt. The former never 
fail, the latter often. There is good done of which we can 
never predicate the when or where. Not in the flushing of 
a pupil's cheek, or the glistening of an attentive eye ; not in 
the shining results of an examination does your real success 
lie. It lies in that invisible influence on character which He 
alone can read who counted the seven thousand nameless 
ones in Israel. 

For ministers, again — what is ministerial success ? Crowd- 
ed churches — full aisles — attentive congregations — the ap- 
"oroval of the religious world — much impression produced ? 



Notes on Psalm LI. 293 

Elijah thought so ; and when he found out his mistake, and 
discovered that the applause on Carniel subsided into hide- 
ous stillness, his heart well-nigh broke with disappointment. 
Ministerial success lies in altered lives and obedient humble 
hearts : unseen work recognized in the judgment-day. 

What is a public man's success? That which can be 
measured by feast-days and the number of journals which 
espouse his cause? Deeper, deeper far must he work who 
works for eternity. In the eye of that, nothing stands but 
gold — real work : all else perishes. 

Get below appearances, below glitter and show. Plant 
your foot upon reality. Not in the jubilee of the myriads 
on Carmel, but in the humble silence of the hearts of the 
seven thousand, lay the proof that Elijah had not lived in 
vain. 



VI. 
NOTES ON PSALM LI. 



Written by David after a double crime: — Uriah put in the forefront of tlis 
battle — the Avife of the murdered man taken, etc. 

A DARKER guilt you will scarcely find — kingly power 
abused — worst passions yielded to. Yet this psalm breathes 
from a spirit touched with the finest sensibilities of spiritual 
feeling. 

Two sides of our mysterious twofold being here. Some- 
thing in us near to hell : something strangely near to God. 
" Half beast— half devil ?" No : rather half diabolical— half 
divine : half demon — half God. This man mixing with the 
world's sins in such sort that we shudder. But he draws 
near the Majesty of God, and becomes softened, purified, 
melted. 

It is good to observe this, that we rightly estimate : gen- 
erously of fallen humanity, moderately of highest saintship. 

In our best estate and in our purest moments there is a 
something of the devil in us which, if it could be known, 
would make men shrink from us. The germs of the worst 
crimes are in us all. In our deepest degradation there re- 
mains something sacred, undefiled, the pledge and gift of our 
better nature : a germ of indestructible life, like the grains of 
wheat among the cerements of a mummy surviving through 
three thousand years, which may be planted, and live, an<i 
srrow ao^aiu. 



294 Notes on Psalm LL 

It is this truth of human feeling which makes the Psalms, 
more than any other portion of the Old Testament, the link 
of union between distant ages. The historical books need a 
rich store of knowledge before they can be a modern book 
of life, but the Psalms are the records of individual experi- 
ence. Personal religion is the same in all ages. The deeps 
of our humanity remain unruffled by the storms of ages which 
change the surface. This psalm, written three thousand years 
ago, might have been written yesterday : describes the vicis- 
situdes of spiritual life in an Englishman as truly as of a Jew. 
" Not of an age, but for all time." 

I. Scripture estimate of sin. 
n. Spiritual restoration. 

L Scripture estimate of sin. 

1. Personal accountability. " My sin " — strange, but true. 
It is hard to believe the sin we do our own. One lays the 
blame on circumstances ; another on those who tempted ; a 
third on Adam, Satan, or his own nature, as if it were not 
himself. " The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the chil- 
dren's teeth are set on edge." 

In this psalm there is no such self-exculpation. Personal 
accountability is recognized throughout. No source of evil 
suggested or conceived but his own guilty will — no shifting 
of responsibility — no pleading of a passionate nature, or of 
royal exposure as peculiar. " I have sinned." " I acknowl- 
edge my transgression : my sin is ever before me." 

One passage only seems at first to breathe a difierent tone : 
" In sin did my mother conceive me." By some interpreted 
as referring to hereditary sin : alleged as a proof of the doc- 
trine of transmitted guilt, as if David traced the cause of his 
act to his maternal character. 

True as the doctrine is that physical and moral qualities 
are transmissible, you do not find that doctrine here. It is not 
in excuse, but in exaggeration of his fault that David speaks. 
He lays on himself the blame of a tainted nature, instead of 
that of a single fault : not a murder only, but of a murderous 
nature. " Conceived in sin." From his first moments up till 
then, he saw sin — sin — sin : nothing but sin. 

Learn the individual character of sin — its personal origin, 
and personal identity. There can be no transference of it. 
It is individual and incommunicable. My sin can not be 
your sin, nor yours mine. 

Conscience, when it is healthy, ever speaks thus: "my 
transgression." It was not the guilt of them that tempted 
you — they have theirs ; but each as a separate agent, hia 



Notes on Psalm LL 295 

own degree of guilt. Yours is your own ; the violation of 
your own and not another's sense of duty ; solitary, awful, 
unshared, adhering to you alone of all the spirits of the 
universe. 

Perilous to refer the evil in us to any source out of and be- 
yond ourselves. In this way penitence becomes impossible : 
fictitious. 

2. Estimated as hateful to God. " Against thee, thee only, 
have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight ; that thou 
mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when 
thou judgest." The simple judgment of the conscience. But 
another estimate, born of the intellect, comes in collision with 
this religion and bewilders it. Look over life, and you will 
find it hard to believe that sin is against God ; that it is not 
rather for Him. 

Undeniable, that out of evil comes good — that evil is the 
resistance in battle, with which good is created and becomes 
possible. Physical evil, for example, hunger, an evil, is the 
parent of industry, human works, all that man has done : it 
beautifies life. The storm-fire burns up the forest, and slays 
man and beast, but purifies the air of contagion. Lately, 
the tragic death of eleven fishermen elicited the sympathy 
and charities of thousands. 

Even moral evil is also generative of good. Peter's cow- 
ardice enabled him to be a comforter : " when he was con- 
verted, to strengthen his brethren." David's crime was a 
vantage-ground, from which he rose through penitence near- 
er to God. Through it this psalm has blessed ages. But if 
the sin had not been done ! 

Now, contemplating this, we begin to perceive that evil is 
God's instrument. " If evil be in the city, the Lord hath 
done it." Then the contemplative intellectualist looks over 
this scene of things, and complacently approves of evil as 
God's contrivance as much as good is — a temporary necessi- 
ty, worthy of His wisdom to create. And then, can He truly 
hate that which He has made ? Can His agent be his enemy ? 
Is it not short-sightedness to be angry with it ? Not the an- 
tagonist of God surely, but His creature and faithful servant 
this evil. Sin can not be " against God." 

Thus arises a horrible contradiction between the instincts 
of the conscience and the judgment of the understanding. 
Judas must have been, says the intellect, God's agent as 
much as Paul. " Why doth He yet find fault ? for who had 
resisted His will ? Do not evil men perform His will ? Why 
should I blame sin in another or myself, seeing it is neces- 
sary ? T\Tiy not say at once, crime and virtue are the same ?'' 



296 Notes on Psalm LL 

Thoughts such as these, at some time or another, I doubt 
not haunt and perplex us all. Conscience is overborne by 
the intellect. Some time during every life the impossibility 
of reconciling these two verdicts is felt, and the perplexity 
confuses action. .Men sin with a secret peradventure behind. 
" Perhaps evil is not so bad, after all — perhaps good — who 
knows?" 

Remember, therefore, in matters practical, conscience, not 
intellect, is our guide. Unsophisticated conscience ever 
speaks this language of the Bible. 

We can not help believing that our sentiments towards 
right and wrong are a reflection of God's. That we call just 
and true, we can not but think is just and true in His sight. 
That which seems base and vile to us, we are compelled to 
think is so to Him — and this in proportion as we act up to 
duty. In that proportion we feel that His sentiments coin- 
cide with ours. 

In such moments when the God within us speaks most per- 
emptorily and distinctly, we feel that the language of this 
psalm is true, and that no other language expresses the truth. 
Sin is not ybr God — can not be, but "against God." An op- 
position to His will, a contradiction to His nature, not a co- 
incidence with it. He abhors it — will banish it, and annihi- 
late it. 

In these days, when French sentimentalism, theological 
dreams, and political speculations are unsettling the old 
landmarks with fearful rapidity, if we do not hold fast, and 
that simply, and firmly, that first principle, that right is right, 
and wrong wrong, all our moral judgments will become con- 
fused, and the penitence of the noblest hearts an absurdity. 
For what can be more absurd than knowingly to reproach 
ourselves for that which God intended ? 

3. Sin estimated as separation from God. Two views of 
sin : The first reckoning it evil, because consequences of pain 
are annexed ; the second evil, because a contradiction of our 
own nature and God's will. 

In this psalm the first is ignored ; the second, implied 
throughout. "Take not thy Holy Spirit from me;" "Have 
mercy upon me," does not mean, Save me from torture. 
You can not read the psalm and think so. It is not the 
trembling of a craven spirit in anticipation of torture, but 
the agonies of a noble one in the horror of being evil. 

If the first view were true, then — if God were by an act of 
will to reverse the consequences, and annex pain to goodness 
and joy to crime — to lie and injure would become duty as 
much as before they were sins. J^ut ])eiialues do not chango 



Notes on Psalm LI. 297 

good into evil. Good is forever good; evil forever evil. 
God Himself could not alter that by a command. Eternal 
hell could not make truth wrong, nor everlasting pleasure en- 
noble sensuality. 

Do you fancy that men like David, shuddering in sight of 
evil, dreaded a material hell ?. I venture to say, into true 
penitence the idea of punishment never enters. If it did, it 
would be almost a relief; but oh ! those moments in which 
a selfish act has appeared more hideous than any pain which 
the fancy of a Dante could devise ! when the idea of the 
strife of self-will in battle with the loving will of God pro- 
longed forever has painted itself to the imagination as the 
real infinite hell ! when self-concentration and the extinc- 
tion of love in the soul has been felt as the real damnation of 
the devil-nature ! 

And recollect how sparingly Christianity appeals to the 
prudential motives. Use them it does, because they are mo- 
tives, but rarely. Retribution is a truth ; and Christianity, 
true to nature, warns of retribution. But, except to rouse 
men sunk in forgetfulness, or faltering with truth, it almost 
never appeals to it : and never, with the hope of eliciting 
from such motives as the hope of heaven or the fear of hell, 
high goodness. 

To do good for reward, the Son of Man declares to be the 
sinner's religion. " If ye lend to them who lend to you, what 
thank have ye ?" and He distinctly proclaims that alone to 
be spiritually good, " the righteousness of God," which " does 
good, hoping for nothing in return ;" adding, as the only 
motive, " that ye may be the children of (^. e., resemble) your 
Father which is in heaven : for He maketh His sun to shine 
on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on 
the unjust." 

n. Restoration. 

First step, sacrifice of a broken spirit. 

Observe the accurate and even Christian perception of the 
real meaning of sacrifice by the ancient spiritually-minded 
Jews. 

Sacrifice has its origin in two feelings : one human, one di- 
vine or inspired. 

Tnie feeling : something to be given to God : surrendered : 
that God must be worshipped with our best. 

Human : added to this, mixed up with it, is the fancy that 
this sacrifice pleases God because of the loss or pain which it 
inflicts. Then men attribute to God their own revengeful 
feelings ; think that the philosophy of sacrifice consists in th<» 



298 Notes on Psalm LI, 

necessity of punishing : call it justice to let the blow fall 
somewhere — no matter where: blood must flow. Hence 
heathen sacrifices were offered to appease the Deity, to buy 
off His wrath — the purer the offering- the better: — to glut 
His fury. Instances illustrating the feeling : Iphigenia ; Zaleu- 
cus ; two eyes given to the law : barbarian rude notions of 
justness mixed up with a father's instincts. Polycrates and 
Amasis ; seal sacrificed to avert the anger of heaven — sup- 
posed to be jealous of mortal prosperity. These notions 
were mixed with Judaism : nay, are mixed up now with 
Christian conceptions of Christ's sacrifice. 

Jewish sacrifices therefore presented two thoughts — to the 
spiritual, true notions ; to the unspiritual, false ; and express- 
ed these feelings for each. But men like David felt that 
what lay beneath all sacrifice as its ground and meaning was 
surrender to God's will — that a man's best is himself — and 
to sacrifice this is the true sacrifice. By degrees they came 
to see that the sacrifice was but a fonn — typical ; and that it 
might be superseded. 

Compare this psalm with Psalm L. 

They were taught this chiefly through sin and suffering. 
Conscience, truly wounded, could not be appeased by these 
sacrifices which were offered year by year continually. The 
selfish coward, who saw in sin nothing terrible but the pen- 
alty, could be satisfied of course. Believing that the animal 
bore his punishment, he had nothing more to dread. But 
they who felt sin to be estrangement from God, who were 
not thinking of punishment, what relief could be given to 
them by being told that the penalty of their sins was borne 
by another being ? They felt that only by surrender to God 
could conscience be at rest. 

Learn then — God does not wish pain, but goodness ; not 
suffering, but you — yourself — your heart. 

Even in the sacrifice of Christ, God wished only this. It 
was precious not because it was pain, but because the pain, 
the blood, the death were the last and highest evidence of 
entire surrender. Satisfaction? Yes, the blood of Christ 
satisfied. Why? Because God can glut His vengeance in 
innocent blood more sweetly than in guilty? Because, like 
the barbarian Zaleucus, so long as the whole penalty is paid, 
He cares not by whom ? Or was it because for the first time 
He saw human nature a copy of the Divine nature — the will 
of Man the Son perfectly coincident with the will of God the 
Father — the love of duty for the first time exhibited by man 
■ — obedience entire, " unto death, even the death of the cross?" 
Was not that the sacrifice which He saw in His beloved Son 



N^otes on P:ialm LI, 299 

wherewith He was well pleased ? Was not that the sacrifice 
of Him who, through the Eternal Spirit, offered Himself with- 
out spot to God : the sacrifice once offered which hath per- 
fected forever them that are sanctified ? 

2. Last step, spirit of liberty. " Thy free spirit " — literal- 
ly, princely. But the ti'anslation is right. A princely is a 
free spirit — unconstrained. Hence St. James calls it " the 
royal law of liberty." 

Two classes of motives may guide to acts of seeming 
goodness: 1. Prudential; 2. Generous. 

The agent of the temperance society appeals to prudential 
motives when he demonstrates the evils of intoxication ; en- 
lists the aid of anatomy; contrasts the domestic happiness 
and circumstantial comfort of the temperate home with that 
of the intemperate. An appeal to the desire of happiness and 
fear of misery. A motive, doubtless, and of unquestionable 
potency. All I say is, that from this class of motives comes 
nothing of the highest stamp. 

Prudential motives will move me : but compare the rush 
of population from east to west for gold with a similar rush 
in the time of the Crusades. A dream — a fancy ; but an 
appeal to generous and unselfish emotions — to enthusiasm 
which has in it no reflex consideration of personal greed : 
in the one case, simply a transfer of population, with vices 
and habits unchanged ; in the other, a sacrifice of home, 
country, all. 

Tell men that salvation is personal happiness, and damna- 
tion personal misery, and that goodness consists in seeking 
the one and avoiding the other, and you will get religionists: 
but poor, stunted, dwarfish — asking, with painful self-con- 
sciousness. Am I saved ? Am I lost ? Prudential considera- 
tions about a distant happiness, conflicting with passionate 
impulses to secure a near and present one : men moving in 
shackles — " letting I dare not wait upon I would." 

Tell men that God is love : that right is right, and wrong 
wrong : let them cease to admire philanthropy, and begin 
to love men : cease to pant for heaven, and begin to love 
God : then the spirit of liberty begins. 

When fear has done its work — whose office is not to create 
holiness but to arrest conscience — and self-abasement has 
set in in earnest, then the free Spirit of God begins to 
breathe upon the soul like a gale from a healthier climate, 
refreshing it with a more gerierous and a purer love. Pru- 
dence is no longer left in painful and hopeless struggle with 
desire : love bursts the shackles of the soul, and we are frea 



300 Obedience the Organ q/ Spiritual Knowledge. 



vn. 

OBEDIEIsrCE THE ORGAN^ OF SPIRITUAL 
KNOWLEDGE. 

ASSIZE SERMON. 

" If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it bo 
of God, or whether I speak of myself. "—John vii. 17. 

The first thing we have to do is to put ourselves in pos- 
session of the history of these words. 

Jesus taught in the Temple during the Feast of Taber- 
nacles. The Jews marvelled at His spiritual wisdom. The 
cause of wonder was the want of scholastic education: 
"How knoweth this man letters, never having learned?" 
They had no conception of any source of wisdom beyond 
learning. 

He Himself gave a different account of the matter. " My 
doctrine is not mine, but His that sent me." And how He 
came possessed of it, speaking humanly, He taught (chap. v. 
30): "My judgment is just, because I seek not mine own 
will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me." 

That principle whereby He attained spiritual judgment 
or wisdom. He extends to all. "If any man will do His 
will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God 
or whether I speak of myself" Here, then, manifestly, theru 
are two opinions respecting the origin of spiritual knowledge : 

1. The popular one of the Jews, relying on a cultivated 
understanding. 

2. The principle of Christ, which relied on trained affec- 
tions, and habits of obedience. 

What is truth? Study, said the Jews. Act, said Christ, 
jind you shall know. A very precious principle to hold by 
in these days, and a very pregnant one of thought to us, 
who during the next few days must be engaged in the con- 
templation of crime, and to whom the question will suggest 
itself, how can men's lives be made true ? 

Religious controversy is fast settling into a conflict be- 
tween two great extreme parties — those who believe every 
thing, and those who believe nothing : the disciples of credu- 
lity, and the disciples of skepticism. 

The first rely on authority. Foremost among these, and 



Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge. 301 

the only self-consistent ones, are the adherents of the Church 
of Rome ; and into this body, by logical consistency, ought 
to merge all — Dissenters, Churchmen, Bible Christians ; all 
who receive their opinions because their sect, their church, 
or their documents assert them, not because they are true 
eternally in themselves. 

The second class rely solely on a cultivated understand- 
ing. This is the root principle of Rationalism. Enlighten, 
they say, and sin will disappear. Enlighten, and we shall 
know all that can be known of God. Sin is an error of the 
understanding, not a crime of the will. Illuminate the un- 
derstanding, show man that sin is folly, and sin will disap- 
pear. Political economy will teach public virtue; knowl- 
edge of anatomy will arrest the indulgence of the passions. 
Show the drunkard the inflamed tissues of the brain, and he 
will be sobered by fear and reason. 

Only enlighten fully, and spiritual truths will be tested. 
When the anatomist shall have hit on a right method of dis- 
section, and appropriated sensation to this filament of the 
brain, and the religious sentiment to that fibre, we shall 
know whether there be a soul or not, and whether conscious- 
ness will survive physical dissolution. When the chemist 
shall have discovered the principle of life, and found cause 
behind cause, we shall know whether the last cause of all is 
a personal will or a lifeless force. 

Concerning whom I only remark now, that these disciples 
of skepticism easily become disciples of credulity. It is in- 
structive to see how they who sneer at Christian mysteries 
as old wives' fables, bow in abject reverence before Egyp- 
tian mysteries of three thousand years' antiquity ; and how 
they who have cast off a God believe in the veriest im- 
posture, and have blind faith in the most vulgar juggling. 
Skepticism and credulity meet. Nor is it difficult to ex- 
plain. Distrusting every thing, they doubt their own con- 
clusions and their own mental powers ; and that for which 
they can not account presents itself to them as supernatural 
and mysterious. Wonder makes them more credulous than 
those they sneer at. 

In opposition to both these systems stands the Christian- 
ity of Christ. 

1. Christ never taught on personal authority. "My doc- 
trine is not mine." He taught " not as the scribes." They 
dogmatized : " because it was written " — stickled for max- 
ims, and lost principles. His authority was the authority of 
truth, not of personality : He commanded men to believe, 
not because He said it, but He said it because it was true. 



302 Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge, 

Hence John xii. 47, 48, " If any man hear my words, and be< 
lieve not, I judge him not : the word that I have spoken, 
the same shall judge him in the last day." 

2. He never taught that cultivation of the understanding 
would do all, but exactly the reverse. And so taught His 
apostles. St. Paul taught, "The world by wisdom knew 
not God." His Master said not that clear intellect will give 
you a right heart, but that a right heart and a pure life will 
clarify the intellect. Not, become a man of letters and learn- 
ing, and you will attain spiritual freedom : but, Do rightly, 
and you will judge justly : obey, and you will know. "My 
judgment is just, because I seek not mine own Avill but the 
will of the Father which sent me." " If any man will do His 
will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or 
whether I speak of myself." 

I. The knowledge of the truth, or Christian knowledge. 
H. The condition on which it is attainable. 

I. Christian knowledge — "he shall know." Its object— 
" the doctrine." Its degree — certainty — " shall knowy 

Doctrine is now, in our modern times, a word of limited 
meaning ; being simply opposed to practical. For instance, 
the Sermon on the Mount would be called practical : St. 
Paul's Epistles doctrinal. But in Scripture, doctrine means 
broadly, teaching : any thing that is taught is doctrine. 
Christ's doctrine embraces the whole range of His teaching 
— every principle and every precept. Let us select three 
departments of "doctrine" in which the principle of the text 
will be found true — " If any man will do His will, he shall 
know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I 
speak of myself." 

1. It holds good in speculative truth. If any man will do 
God's will, he shall know what is truth and what is error. 
Let us see how willfulness and selfishness hinder impartial- 
ity. How comes it that men are almost always sure to ar- 
rive at the conclusions reached by their own party ? Surely 
because fear, interest, vanity, or the desire of being reckoned 
sound and judicious, or party spirit, bias them. Personal 
prospects, personal antipathies, these determine most men's 
creed. How will you remove this hindrance ? By increased 
cultivation of mind ? Why, the Romanist is as accomplished 
as the Protestant, and learning is found in the Church and 
out of it. You are not sure that high mental cultivation will 
lead a man either to Protestantism or to the Church of Eng- 
land. Surely, then, by removing self-will, and so only, can 
the hindrance to right opinions be removed. Take away the 



Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge, 303 

last trace of interested feeling, and the way is cleared for 
men to come to an approximation towards unity, even in 
judgment on points speculative; and so he that will do 
God's will shall know of the doctrine. 

2. In practical truths the principle is true. It is more 
true to say that our opinions depend upon our lives and 
habits, than to say that our lives depend upon our opinions, 
which is only now and then true. The fact is, men think in 
a certain mode on these matters because their life is of a 
certain character, and their opinions are only invented after- 
wards as a defense for their life. 

For instance, St. Paul speaks of a maxim among the Co- 
rinthians, " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." 
They excused their voluptuousness on the ground of its con- 
sistency with their skeptical creed. Life was short. Death 
came to-morrow. There was no hereafter. Therefore it was 
quite consistent to live for pleasure. But who does not see 
that the creed was the result, and not the cause of the life ? 
Who does not see \ki2X first they ate and drank, and then be- 
lieved to-morrow we die ? " Getting and spending, we lay 
waste our powers." Eating and drinking, we lose sight of 
the life to come. When the immortal is overborne and 
smothered in the life of the flesh, how can men believe in 
life to come ? Then disbelieving, they mistook the cause for 
the effect. Their moral habits and creed were in perfect con- 
sistency : yet it was the life that formed the creed, not the 
creed that formed the life. Because they were sensualists, 
immortality had become incredible. 

Again, slavery is defended philosophically by some. The 
negro, on his skull and skeleton, they say, has God's intention 
of his servitude written : he is the inferior animal, therefore 
it is right to enslave him. Did this doctrine precede the 
slave-trade ? Did man arrive at it, and then in consequence, 
conscientiously proceed with human traffic ? Or was it in- 
vented to defend a practice existing already — the offspring 
of self-interest ? Did not men first make slaves, and then 
search about for reasons to make their conduct plausible to 
themselves ? 

So, too, a belief in predestination is sometimes alleged in 
excuse of crime. But a man who suffers his will to be over- 
powered, naturally comee to believe that he is the sport of 
fate : feeling powerless, he believes that God's decree has 
made him so. But let him but put forth one act of loving 
will, and then, as the nightmare of a dream is annihilated by 
an effort, so the incubus of a belief in tyrannous destiny ia 
dissipated the moment a man wills to do the will of God 



304 Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge, 

Observe, how he knows the doctrine, directly he does the 
will. 

There is another thing said respecting this knowledge, of 
truth. It respects the degree of certainty — " he shall know^'* 
not he shall have an opinion. There is a wide distinction 
between supposing and knowing — between fancy and con- 
viction — between opinion and belief. Whatever rests on au- 
thority remains only supposition. You have an opinion 
when you know what others think. You knoio when you 
feel. In matters practical you know only so far as you can 
do. Read a work on the " Evidences of Christianity," and 
it may become highly probable that Christianity, etc., are 
true. That is an opinion. Feel God, do His will, till the 
Absolute Imperative w^ithin you speaks as with a living 
voice. Thou shalt, and thou shalt not ; and then you do not 
think, you hiow that there is a God. That is a conviction 
and a belief. 

Have we never seen how a child, simple and near to God, 
cuts asunder a web of sophistry with a single direct ques- 
tion — how, before its steady look and simple argument, some 
fashionable utterer of a conventional falsehood has been 
abashed? — how a believing Christian scatters the forces of 
skepticism, as a morning ray, touching the mist on the 
mountain side, makes it vanish into thin air? And there 
are few more glorious moments of our humanity than those 
in which faith does battle against intellectual proof: when, 
for example, after reading a skeptical book, or hearing a 
cold-blooded materialist's demonstration in which God, the 
soul, and life to come, are proved impossible, up rises the 
heart in all the giant might of its immortality to do battle 
with the understanding, and with the simple argument, "I 
feel them in my best and highest moments to be true," anni- 
hilates the sophistries of logic. 

These moments of profound faith do not come once for 
all : they vary with the degree and habit of obedience. 
There is a plant which blossoms once in a hundred years. 
Like it, the soul blossoms only now and then in a space of 
years; but these moments are the glory and the heavenly 
glimpses of our purest humanity. 

n. The condition on which knowledge of truth is attain- 
able. "If any man will do His will, he shall know of the 
doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself" 

Tliis universe is governed by laws. At the bottom of ev- 
ery thing here there is a law. Things are in this way and 
not that : we call that a law or condition. All departments 



Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge, 305 

have their own laws. By submission to them, you make 
them your own. Obey the laws of the body — such laws aa 
say, Be temperate and chaste : or of the mind — such laws as 
say. Fix the attention, strengthen by exercise ; and then their 
prizes are yours — health, strength, pliability of muscle, tena- 
ciousness of memory, nimbleness of imagination, etc. Obey 
the law^s of your spiritual being, and it has its prizes too. 
For instance, the condition or law of a peaceful life is sub- 
mission to the law of meekness : " Blessed are the meek, for 
they shall inherit the earth." The condition of the Beatific 
vision is a pure heart and life: "Blessed are the pure in 
heart, for they shall see God." To the impure, God is sim- 
ply invisible. The condition annexed to a sense of God's 
presence — in other w^ords, that w^ithout w^hich a sense of 
God's presence can not be — is obedience to the laws of love : 
"If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is 
perfected in us." The condition of spiritual wisdom and cer- 
tainty in truth is obedience to the wall of God, surrender of 
private will : " If any man will do His will, he shall know of 
the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of 
myself" 

In every department of knowledge, therefore, there is an 
appointed " organ," or instrument for discovery of its specific 
truth, and for appropriating its specific blessings. In the 
world of sense, the empirical intellect : in that world the 
Baconian philosopher is supreme. His Novum Organon is 
experience : he knows by experiment of touch, sight, sound, 
etc. The religious man may not contravene his assertions: 
he is lord in his own province. But in the spiritual world, 
the " organ " of the scientific man — sensible experience — is 
powerless. If the chemist, geologist, physiologist come back 
from their spheres and say, we find in the laws of affinity, in 
the deposits of past ages, in the structure of the human 
frame, no trace nor token of a God, I simply reply, I never 
expected you w^ould. Obedience and self-surrender is the 
sole organ by w^hich w^e gain a knowledge of that which can 
not be seen nor felt. " Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, 
neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which 
God hath prepared for them that love him." And just as by 
copying perpetually a master-painter's works w^e get at last 
an instinctive and infallible power of recognizing his touch, 
so by copying and doing God's will we recognize what is 
His : we know of the teaching whether it be of God, or 
whether it be an arbitrary invention of a human self 

2. Observe the universality of the law. " li any man w^ill 
do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of 



3o6 Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge, 

God, or whether I speak of myself." The law was true of 
the man Christ Jesus Himself. He tells us it is true of all 
other men. 

In God's universe there are no favorites of heaven who 
may transgress the laws of the universe with impunity — 
none who can take fire in the hand and not be burnt — no 
enemies of heaven who, if they sow corn, will reap nothing 
but tares. The law is just and true to all : " Whatsoever a 
-man soweth, that shall he also reap." 

In God's spiritual universe there are no favorites of heaven 
who can attain knowledge and spiritual wisdom apart from 
obedience. There are none reprobate by an eternal decree, 
who can surrender self, and in all things submit to God, and 
yet fail of spiritual convictions. It is not therefore a rare, 
partial condescension of God, arbitrary and causeless, which 
gives knowledge of the truth to some, and shuts it out from 
others, but a vast, universal, glorious law. The light light- 
eth every man that cometh into the world. " If any man 
will do His will, he shall know." 

See the beauty of this Divine arrangement. If the cer- 
tainty of truth depended upon the proof of miracles, prophe- 
cy, or the discoveries of science, then truth would be in the 
reach chiefly of those who can weigh evidence, investigate 
history, and languages, study by experiment ; whereas as it 
is, "The meek will He guide in judgment, and the meek will 
He teach His way." "Thus saith the high and lofty One 
''^Lhat inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy ; I dwell in the 
high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and 
humble spirit." The humblest and the weakest may know 
more of God, of moral evil and of good, by a single act of 
charity, or a prayer of self-surrender, than all the sages can 
teach : ay, or all the theologians can dogmatize upon. 

They know nothing, perhaps, these humble ones, of the evi- 
dences, but they are sure that Christ is their Redeemer. 
They can not tell what " matter " is, but they know that they 
are spirits. They know nothing of the " argument from de- 
sign," but they feel God. The truths of God 'are spiritually 
discerned by them. They have never learned letters, but 
they have reached the Truth of Life. 

3. Annexed to this condition, or a part of it, is earnestness. 
"If any man %Ml do His will." Now that word "will" is 
not the will of the future tense, but will meaning volition : 
if any man wills, resolves, has the mind to do the will of 
God. So then it is not a chance fitful obedience that leads 
us to the truth, nor an obedience paid while happiness lasts 
ftud no longer, but an obedience rendered in entireness and 



Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge, 307 

in earnest. It is not written, " If any man does His will," 
but if any man has the spirit and desire. If we are in ear- 
nest, we shall persevere like the Syrophenician woman, even 
though the ear of the universe seem deaf, and Christ Himself 
appear to bid us back. If we are not in earnest, difficulties 
will discourage us. Because will is wanting, we shall be 
asking still in ignorance and doubt, What is truth ? 

All this will seem to mar y people time misspent. They go 
to church because it is the custom, and all Christians believe 
it is the established religion. But there are hours, and they 
come to us all at some period of life or other, when the hand 
of Mystery seems to lie heavy on the soul — when some life- 
shock scatters existence, leaves it a blank and dreary waste 
henceforth forever, and there appears nothing of hope in all 
the expanse which stretches out, except that merciful gate of 
death which opens at the end — hours when the sense of mis- 
placed or ill-requited affection, the feeling of personal worth- 
lessness, the uncertainty and meanness of all human aims, and 
the doubt of all human goodness, unfix the soul from all its 
old moorings, and leave it drifting, drifting over the vast in- 
finitude, with an awful sense of solitariness. Then the man 
whose faith rested on outward authority and not on inward 
life, wdll find it give way: the authority of the priest, the au- 
thority of the Church, or merely the authority of a document 
proved by miracles and backed by prophecy, the soul — con- 
scious life hereafter— God — will be an awful desolate Perhaps. 
Well in such moments you doubt all — whether Christianity 
be true : whether Christ was man, or God, or a beautiful fable. 
You ask bitterly, like Pontius Pilate, What is truth ? In 
such an hour what remains? I reply, obedience. Leave 
those thoughts for the present. Act — be merciful and gentle 
— honest ; force yourself to abound in little services ; try to 
do good to others; be true to the duty that you know. 
Tliat must be right, whatever else is uncertain. And by all 
the laws of the human heart, by the word of God, you shall 
not be left to doubt. Do that much of the will of God which 
is plain to you, and " You shall know of the doctrine, wheth- 
er it be of God." 



;o8 Religious Depression^ 



VIII. 
RELIGIOUS DEPRESSION. 

"As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after 
thee, O God, My soul thirsteth for God, for the liviug God : when shall I 
come and appear before God ? My tears have been my meat day and night, 
while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God ?" — Psalm xlii. 1-3. 

The value of the public reading of the Psalms in our serv- 
ice is, that they express for us indirectly those deeper feel- 
ings which there would be a sense of indelicacy in express- 
ing directly. 

Example of Joseph : asking after his father, and blessing 
his brothers, as it were, u.nder the personality of another. 

There are feelings of which we do not speak to each oth- 
er ; they are too sacred and too delicate. Such are most of 
our feelings to God. If we do speak of them, they lose their 
fragrance : become coarse : nay, there is even a sense of in- 
delicacy and exposure. 

Now the Psalms afford precisely the right relief for this 
feeling : wrapped up in the forms of poetry, metaphor, etc., 
that which might seem exaggerated is excused by those who 
do not feel it ; while they who do can read them, applying 
them, without the suspicion of uttering their ow7i feelings. 
Hence their soothing power, and hence, while other portions 
of Scripture may become obsolete, they remain the most pre* 
cious parts of the Old Testament. For the heart of man is 
the same in all ages. 

This forty-second Psalm contains the utterance of a sor- 
row of which men rarely speak. There is a grief worse than 
lack of bread or loss of friends. Men in former times called 
it spiritual desertion. But at times the utterances of this 
solitary grief are, as it were, overheard, as in this Psalm. 
Read verses 6, 1. And in a more august agony, " My God. 
my God, why hast thou forsaken me ?" 

I. Causes of David's despondency. 
II. The consolation. 

I. Causes of David's despondency. 

1. The thirst for God. " My soul thirsteth for God, for 

the living God : when shall I come and aj^pear before God?" 

There is a desire in tlie human heart best described as the 



Religious Depression. 309 

cravings of infinitude. We are so made that nothing which 
has limits satisfies. Hence the sense of freedom and relief 
which comes from all that suggests the idea of boundless- 
ness : the deep sky, the dark night, the endless circle, the il- 
limitable ocean. 

Hence, too, our dissatisfaction with all that is or can be 
done. There never was the beauty yet than which we could 
not conceive something more beautiful. None so good as to 
be faultless in our eyes. No deed done by us, but we feel 
we have it in us to do a better. The heavens are not clean 
in our sight, and the angels are charged with folly. 

Therefore to never rest is the price paid for our greatness. 
Could we rest, we must become smaller in soul. Whoever 
is satisfied with what he does has reached his culminating 
point : he will progress no more. Man's destiny is to be not 
dissatisfied, but forever unsatisfied. 

Infinite goodness — a beauty beyond what eye hath seen 
or heart imagined, a justice which shall have no flaw, and a 
righteousness which shall have no blemish — to crave for 
that, is to be " athirst for God." 

2. The temporary loss of the sense of God's personality. 
" My soul is athirst for the living God." 

Let us search our own experience. What we want is, we 
shall find — not infinitude, but a boundless One; not to feel 
that love is the laio of this universe, but to feel One whose 
name is love. 

For else, if in this world of order there be no One in whose 
bosom that order is centred, and of whose Being it is the ex- 
pression ; in this world of manifold contrivance, no personal 
afi*ection which gave to the skies their trembling tenderness, 
and to the snow its purity, then order, affection, contrivance, 
wisdom, are only horrible abstractions, and we are in the 
dreary universe alone. 

Foremost in the declaration of this truth was the Jewish 
religion. It proclaimed — not "Let us meditate on the 
Adorable Light, it shall guide our intellects " — which is the 
most sacred verse of the Hindoo sacred books — but " Thus 
saith the Lord, I am, that I am." In that word "I am" is 
declared personality ; and it contains, too, in the expression, 
"Thus 5azYA," the real idea of a revelation, viz., the volunta- 
ry approach of the Creator to the creature. 

Accordingly, these Jewish Psalms are remarkable for that 
personal tenderness towards God — those outbursts of pas- 
sionate individual attachment which are in every page. A 
person, asking and giving heart for heart — inspiring love, be- 
cause feelino: it — that was the Israelite's Jehovah. 



3IO Religious Depression. 

Now distinguish this from the God of the philosopher and 
the God of the mere theologian. 

The God of the mere theologian is scarcely a living God — 
He did live ; but for some eighteen hundred years we are 
credibly informed that no trace of His life has been seen. 
The canon is closed The proofs that He was are in the 
things that He has made, and the books of men to whom He 
spake ; but He inspires and works wonders no more. Ac- 
cording to the theologians, He gives us proofs of design in- 
stead of God — doctrines instead of the life indeed. 

Different, too, from the God of the philosopher. The 
tendency of philosophy has been to tVow back the personal 
Being farther and still farther from the time when every 
branch and stream was believed a living power, to the pe- 
riod when "principles" were substituted for this belief; 
then " laws ;" and the philosopher's God is a law into which 
all other laws are resolvable. 

Quite differently to this speaks the Bible of God. Not as a 
law, but as the life of all that is — the Being who feels, and is 
felt — is loved, and loves again — feels my heart throb into His 
— counts the hairs of my head : feeds the ravens and clothes 
the lilies : hears my prayers, and interprets them through a 
Spirit which has affinity with my spirit. 

It is a dark moment when the sense of that personality is 
lost : more terrible than the doubt of immortality. For of 
the two — eternity without a personal God, or God for seveur 
ty years without immortality — no one after David's heart 
would hesitate, " Give me God for life, to know and be 
known by Him." No thought is more hideous than that of 
an eternity without Him. " My soul is athirst for God." 
The desire for immortality is second to the desire for God. 

3. The taunts of scoffers. "As the hart panteth after the 
water-brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God." Now 
the hart here spoken of is the hart hunted, at bay, the big 
tears rolling from his eyes, and the moisture standing black 
upon his side. Let us see what the persecution was. " Where 
is now thy God ?" (ver. 3). This is ever the way in religious 
perplexity: the unsympathizing world taunts or misunder- 
stands. In spiritual grief they ask. Why is he not like oth- 
ers ? In bereavement they call your deep sorrow unbelief. 
In misfortune they comfort you, like Job's friends, by calling 
it a visitation. Or like the barbarians at Melita when the 
viper fastened on Paul's hand, no doubt they call you an in- 
fidel, though your soul be crying after God. Specially in 
that dark and awful hour, when He called on God, " Eloi, 
Kloi," thoy said, " Let be: let us see whether Elias will como 
to save Him." 



Religious Depression. 3 1 1 

Now this is sharp to bear. It is easy to say Ghristian for- 
titude should be superior to it ; but in darkness to have no 
sympathy ; when the soul gropes for God, to have the hand 
of man relax its grasp ! Forest-flies, small as they are, drive 
the noble war-horse mad : therefore David says, "As a sword 
in my bones, mine enemies reproach me : while they say 
daily unto me, Where is thy God?" (ver. 10). Now, ob- 
serve, this feeling of forsakenness is no proof of being forsak- 
siL I.' Mourning after an absent God is an evidence of love as 
strong as rejoicing in a present one.; Nay, further, a man 
may be more decisively the servant of God and goodness 
while doubting His existence, and in the anguish of his soul 
crying for light, than while resting in a common creed, and 
coldly serving Him. There has been One at least whose ap- 
parent forsakenness and whose seeming doubt bears the 
stamp of the majesty of faith. " My God, my God, why 
hast thou forsaken me ?" 

n. David's consolation. 

1. And first, in hope (see verse 5) : distinguish between the 
feelings of faith that God is present, and the hope of faith 
that He will be so. 

There are times when a dense cloud veils the sunlight : 
you can not see the sun, nor feel him. Sensitive tempera- 
ments feel depression, and that unaccountably and irresisti- 
bly. No effort can make you feel. Then you hope. Be- 
hifld the cloud the sun is ; from thence he will come ; the 
day drags through, the darkest and longest night ends at 
last. Thus we bear the darkness and the otherwise intolera- 
ble cold, and many a sleepless night. It does not shine now, 
but it will. 

So too, spiritually. There are hours in which physical de- 
rangement darkens the windows of the soul ; days in which 
shattered nerves make life simply endurance; months and 
years in which intellectual difficulties, pressing for solution, 
shut out God. Then faith must be replaced by hope. 
" What I do thou knowest not now ; but thou shalt know 
hereafter." " Clouds and darkness are round about Him : hut 
righteousness and truth are the habitation of His throne." 
"My soul, hope thou in God : for I shall yet praise Him, who 
is the health of my countenance and my God." 

2. This hope was in God. 

The mistake we make is to look for a source of comfort in 
ourselves : self-contemplation, instead of gazing upon God. 
In other words, we look for comfort precisely where comfort 
never can be. 



312 Religious Depression, 

For first, it is impossible to derive consolation from our 
own feelings, because of their mutability: to-day we are 
well, and our spiritual experience, partaking of these circum- 
st«,nces, is bright; but to-morrow some outward circum- 
stances change — the sun does not shine, or the wind is chill, 
and we are low, gloomy, and sad. Then if our hopes were 
unreasonably elevated, they will now be unreasonably de- 
pressed ; and so our experience becomes flux and reflux, ebb 
and flow; like the sea, that emblem of instability. 

Next, it is impossible to get comfort from our own acts ; 
for though acts are the test of character, yet in a low state 
no man can judge justly of his own acts. They assume a 
darkness of hue wliich is reflected on them by the eye that 
contemplates them. It would be well for all men to remem- 
ber that sinners can not judge of sin — least of all, can we es- 
timate our own sin. 

Besides, we lose time in remorse. I have sinned ; well, by 
the grace of God I must endeavor to do better for the future. 
But if I mourn for it overmuch all to-day, refusing to be com- 
forted, to-morrow I shall have to mourn the wasted to-day; 
and that again will be the subject of another fit of remorse. 

In the wilderness, had the children of Israel, instead of 
gazing on the serpent, looked down on their own wounds to 
watch the process of the granulation of the flesh, and see how 
deep the wound was, and whether it was healing slowly or 
fast, cure would have been impossible : their only chance was 
to look off the wounds. Just so, when giving up this hope- 
less and sickening work of self-inspection, and turning from 
ourselves in Christian self-oblivion, we gaze on God, then first 
the chance of consolation dawns. 

He is not affected by our mutability ; our changes do not 
alter Him. When we are restless. He remains serene and 
calm ; when we are low, selfish, mean, or dispirited, He is 
still the unalterable I AM. The same yesterday, to-day, and 
forever, in whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turn- 
ing. What God is in Himself, not what we may chance te 
feel Him in this or that moment to be, that is our hope. 
*My soul, hope thou in God,'*'* 



Faith of the Centurion. 313 



IX. 

FAITH OF THE CENTURION. 

" When Jesus heard it, he marvelled, and said to them that followed, 
Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. " — 
Matt.'viii. 10. 

That upon which the Son of God fastened as worthy of 
admiration was not the centurion's benevolence, nor his per- 
severance, but his faith. And so speaks the whole New Tes- 
tament, giving a special dignity to faith. By faith we are 
justified. By faith man removes mountains of difficulty. 
The Divinest attribute in the heart of God is love, and the 
mightiest, because the most human, principle in the breast 
of man is faith. Love is heaven, faith is that which appro- 
priates heaven. 

Faith is a theological term rarely used in other matters. 
Hence its meaning is obscured. But faith is no strange, new, 
peculiar power, supernaturally infused by Christianity, but 
the same principle by which we live from day to day — one 
of the commonest in our daily life. 

We trust our senses, and that though they often deceive 
i»s. We trust men ; a battle must often be risked on the in- 
telligence of a spy. A merchant commits his ships, with all 
his fortunes on board, to a hired captain, whose temptations 
are enormous. Without this principle society could not hold 
together for a day. It would be a mere sand-heap. 

Such, too, is religious faith ; we trust on probabilities ; and 
this though probabilities often are against us. We can not 
prove God's existence. The balance of probabilities, scien- 
tifically speaking, are nearly equal for a living person or a 
lifeless cause : immortality, etc., in the same way. But faith 
throws its own convictions into the scale and decides the pre- 
ponderance. 

Faith, then, is that which, when probabilities are equal, 
ventures on God's side, and on the side of right, on the guar- 
antry of a something within which makes the thing seem to 
be true because it is loved. 

It is so defined by St. Paul : " Faith is the substance of 
things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen." The hope 
is the ground for faith to rest on We consider^ 



314 Faith of the Centurion, 

I. The faith which was commended. 
n. The causes of the commendation. 

I. The faith which was commended. 

First evidence of its existence, his tenderness to his serv^ 
ant. 

Of course this good act might have existed separate from 
religion. Romans were benevolent to their domestics ages be- 
fore the law had been enacted regulating the relationship be- 
tween patron and client. 

But we are forbidden to view it so, when we remember 
that he was a proselyte. Morality is not religion, but it is 
ennobled and made more delicate by religion. 

How ? By instinct you may be kind to dependents. But 
if it be only by instinct, it is but the same kind of tenderness 
you show to your hound or horse. Disbelief in God, and 
right, and immortality, degrades the man you are kind to, to 
the level of the beast you feel for. Both are mortal, and for 
both your kindness is finite and poor. 

But the moment faith comes, dealing as it does with things 
infinite, it throws something of its own infinitude on the per- 
sons loved by the man of faith, upon his affections and his 
acts : it raises them. 

Consequently you find the centurion "building syna- 
gogues," " caring for our (^. e., the Jewish) nation," as the 
repository of the truth — tending his servants. And this 
last, observe, approximated his moral goodness to the Chris- 
tian standard ! for therein does Christianity differ from mere 
religiousness, that it is not a worship of the high, but a 
lifting up of the low — not hero-worship, but Divine conde- 
scension. 

Thus, then, was his kindness an evidence of his faith. 

Second proof. His humility : " Lord, I am not worthy that 
thou shouldest come under my roof" 

Now Christ does not call this humility, though it was hu' 
mility. He says, I have not found so great faith. Let us 
see why. How is humbleness the result of, or rather identi- 
cal with, faith ? 

Faith is trust. Trust is dependence on another ; the spirit 
which is opposite to independence or trust in self Hence 
where the spirit of proud independence is, faith is not. 

Now observe how this differs from our ordinary and mod- 
ern modes of thinking. The first thing taught a young man 
is that he must bo independent. Quite right, in the Christian 
sense of the word, to owe no inan any thing : to resolve to 
get his own living, and not be btjholden to charity, which fos* 



Faith of the Centurion. 3 1 5 

ters idleness : to depend on his own exertions, and not on 
patronage or connection. But what is commonly meant by 
independence is to rejoice at being bound by no ties to other 
human beings — to owe no allegiance to any will except our 
own — to be isolated and unconnected by any feeling of inter- 
communion or dependence ; a spirit whose very life is jeal- 
ousy and suspicion : which in politics is revolutionary, and in 
religion atheism. This is the opposite of Christianity, and 
the opposite of the Christian freedom whose name it usurps. 
For true freedom is to be emancipated from all false lords, in 
order to owe allegiance to all true lords — to be free from the 
slavery of all lusts, so as voluntarily to serve God and right. 
Faith alone frees. 

And this was the freedom of the centurion : that he chose 
his master. He was not fawning on the emperor at Rome, 
nor courting the immoral ruler at Caesarea who bad titles 
and places to give away, but he bent in lowliest homage of 
heart before the Holy One. His freedom was the freedom 
of uncoerced and voluntary dependence — the freedom and 
humility of faith. 

3. His belief in an invisible, living Will. " Speak the 
word only." Remark how diiferent this is from a reliance 
on the influence of the senses. He asked not the presence 
of Christ, but simply an exertion of His will. He looked 
not like a physician to the operation of unerring laws, or the 
result of the contact of matter with matter. He believed in 
Him who is the life indeed. He felt that the Cause of causes 
is a person. Hence he could trust the Living Will out of 
sight. This is the highest form of faith. 

Here, however, I observe — the centurion learned this 
through his own profession. " I am a man under authority, 
having soldiers under me." The argument ran thus. I by 
the command of will obtain the obedience of my dependents. 
Thou by will the obedience of Thine : sickness and health 
are Thy servants. Evidently he looked upon this universe 
with a soldier's eye : he could not look otherwise. To him 
this world was a mighty camp of living forces in which au- 
thority was paramount. Trained in obedience to military 
law, accustomed to render prompt submission to those above 
him, and to extract it from those below him, he read law 
everywhere ; and law to him meant nothing, unless it meant 
the expression of a personal will. It was this training 
through which faith took its/br/n. 

The Apostle Paul tells us that the invisible things of God 
from the creation of the world are clearly seen ; and, we may 
add, from every part oi. Xh^ creation of the world, "The heav 



3i6 Faith of the Centurion, 

ens declare the glory of God ;" but so also does the butter 
cup and the raindrop. 

The invisible things of God from life are clearly seen — 
and, we may add, from every department of life. There is 
no profession, no trade, no human occupation which does not 
in its own way educate for God. 

The soldier, through law, reads a personal will; and he 
might from the same profession, in the unity of an army, 
made a living and organized unity by the variety of its parts, 
have read the principle of God's and the Church's unity, 
through the opportunities that profession affords for self- 
control, for generous deeds. When the Gospel was first an- 
nounced on earth, it was proclaimed to the shepherds and 
Magians in a manner appropriate to their modes of life. 

Shepherds, like sailors, are accustomed to hear a supernat- 
ural power in the sounds of the air, in the moaning of the 
night-winds, in the sighing of the storm ; to see a more than 
mortal life in the clouds that wreathe around the headland. 
Such men, brought up among the sights and sounds of na- 
ture, are proverbially superstitious. No wonder, therefore, 
that the intimation came to them, as it were, on the winds in 
the melodies of the air : " a multitude of the heavenly host 
praisixig God, and saying. Glory to God in the highest, and 
on earth peace, good-will toward men." 

But the Magians being astrologers, accustomed to read 
the secrets of life and death in the clear star-lit skies of 
Persia, are conducted by a meteoric star. 

Each in his own way ; each in his own profession ; each 
through that little spot of the universe given to him. For 
not only is God everywhere, but all of God is in every point. 
Not His v»nsdom here, and His goodness there : the whole 
truth may be read, if we had eyes, and heart, and time 
enough, in the laws of a daisy's growth. God's beauty. His 
love, His unity : nay, if you observe how each atom exists 
not for itselt alone, but for the sake of every other atom in 
the universe, in that atom or daisy you may read the law of 
the Cross itself. The crawling of a spider before now has 
taught perseverance, and led to a crown. The little moss, 
brought close to a traveller's eye in an African desert, who 
had lain down to die, roused him to faith in that love which 
had so curiously arranged the minute fibres of a thing so 
small, to be seen once and but once by a human eye, and 
carried him in the strength of that heavenly repast, like Eli- 
jah of old, a journey of forty days and forty nights, to the 
sources of the Nile ; yet who could have suspected divinity 
in a spider, or theology in a moss ? 



Faith of the Centurion. 317 

n. The causes of Christ's astonishment. 
The reasons why he marvelled may be reduced under two 
heads. 

1. The centurion was a Gentile ; therefore unlikely to 
know revealed truth. 

2. A soldier, and therefore exposed to a recklessness, and 
idleness, and sensuality which are the temptations of that 
profession. But he turned his loss to glorious gain. 

The Saviour's comment, therefore, contained the advan- 
tage of disadvantages, and the disadvantage of advantages. 
The former, " Many shall come from the east and the west, 
and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in 
the kingdom of heaven ;" the latter, " The children of the 
kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness ; there shall 
be weeping and gnashing of teeth." 

There are spirits which are crushed by difficulties, while 
others would gain strength from them. The greatest men 
have been those who have cut their way to success through 
difficulties. And such have been the greatest triumphs of 
art and science: such, too, of religion. Moses, Elijah, Abra- 
ham, the Baptist, the giants of both Testaments, were not 
men nurtured in the hot-house of religious advantages. 
Many a man would have done good if he had not a super- 
abundance of the means of doing it. Many a spiritual giant 
is buried under mountains of gold. 

Understand, therefore, the real amount of advantage 
which there is in religious privileges. Necessary especially 
for the feeble, as crutches are necessary ; but, like crutches, 
they often enfeeble the strong. For every advantage which 
faciJitates performance and supersedes toil, a corresponding 
price is paid in loss. Civilization gives us telescopes and 
microscopes ; but it takes away the unerring acuteness with 
which the savage reads the track of man and beast upon the 
ground at his feet : it gives us scientific surgery, and impairs 
the health which made surgery superfluous. 

So, ask you where the place of religious might is ? iN'ot 
the place of religious privileges — not where prayers are 
daily, and sacraments monthly — not where sermons are so 
abundant as to pall upon the pampered taste, but on the hill- 
side with the Covenanter ; in the wilderness with John the 
Baptist ; in our own dependencies where the liturgy is rarely 
heard, and Christian friends meet at the end of months : — • 
there amidst manifold disadvantages, when the soul is thrown 
upon itself, a few kindred spirits, and God, grow up those 
heroes of faith, like the centurion, whose firm conviction wins 
admiration even from the Son of God Himself. 



3 1 8 The Restoration of the Erring, 

Lastly, see how this incident testifies to the perfect hu» 
manity of Christ. The Saviour " marvelled :" — that wonder 
was no fictitious semblance of admiration. It was a real gen- 
uine wonder. He had not expected to find such faith. The 
Son of God increased in wisdom as well as stature. He knew 
more at thirty than at twenty. There were things He knew 
at twenty which He had not known before. In the last year 
of His life He went to the fig-tree expecting to find fruit, and 
was disappointed. In all matters of eternal truth, principles 
which are not measured by more or less true, His knowledge 
was absolute ; but it would seem that in matters of earthly 
fact which are modified by time and space. His knowledge 
was, like ours, more or less dependent upon experience. 

Now we forget this; we are shocked at the thought of the 
partial ignorance of Christ, as if it were irreverence to think 
it ; we shrink from believing that He really felt the force of 
temptation, or that the forsakennt^ss on the Cross and the 
momentary doubt have parallels in our human life. In other 
words, we make that Divine Life a mere mimic representa- 
tion of griefs that were not real, and surprises that were 
feigned, and sorrows that were theatrical. 

But thus we lose the Saviour. For it is well to know that 
He was divine ; but if we lose that truth, we should still 
have a God in heaven. But if there has been on this earth 
no real, perfect human life, no love that never cooled, no faith 
that never failed, which may shine as a loadstar across the 
darkness of our experience, a light to light amidst all convic- 
tions of our own meanness and all suspicions of others' little- 
ness, why, we may have a religion, but we have not a Christi- 
anity. For if we lose Him as a Brother, we can not feel Him 
as a Saviour. 



X. 

THE RESTORATION^ OF THE ERRING. 

"Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore 
guch a one in the spirit of meekness ; considering thyself, lest thou also be 
tempted. Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. " — 
Gal. vi. 1, 2. 

It would be a blessed thing for our Christian society if we 
could contemplate sin from the same point of view from 
which Christ and His apostles saw it. But in this matter 
society is ever oscillating between two extremes — undue lax- 
ity and undue severity. 



The Restoration of the Erring. 3 1 9 

In one age of the Church — the days of Donatism, for in- 
stance — men refuse the grace of repentance to those who have 
erred : holding that baptismal privileges once forfeited can 
not be got back; that for a single distinct lapse there is no 
restoration. 

In another age, the Church, having found out its error, and 
discovered the danger of setting up an impossible standard, 
begins to confer periodical absolutions and plenary indul- 
gences, until sin, easily forgiven, is as easily committed. 

And so too with societies and legislatures. In one period 
Puritanism is dominant and morals severe. There are no 
small faults. The statute-book is defiled with the red mark 
of blood, set opposite innumerable misdemeanors. In an 
age still earlier the destruction of a wild animal is punished 
like the murder of a man. Then in another period we have 
such a medley of sentiments and sickliness that we have lost 
all our bearings, and can not tell what is vice and what is 
goodness. Charity and toleration degenerate into that feeble 
dreaminess which refuses to be roused by stern views of life. 

This contrast, too, may exist in the same age, nay, in the 
same individual. One man gifted with talent, or privileged 
by rank, outrages all decency: the world smiles, calls it 
eccentricity, forgives, and is very merciful and tolerant. 
Then some one unshielded by these advantages, endorsed 
neither by wealth nor birth, sins — not to one-tenth, nor one- 
ten-thousandth part of the same extent: society is seized 
with a virtuous indignation, rises up in wrath, asks what is 
to become of the morals of the community if these things 
are committed, and protects its proprieties by a rigorous 
exclusion of the offender, cutting off the bridge behind him 
against his return forever. 

Now the Divine character of the Kew Testament is shown 
in nothing more signally than in the stable ground from 
which it views this matter, in comparison with the shifting 
and uncertain standing-point from whence the world sees it. 
It says, never retracting nor bating, " The wages of sin is 
death." It speaks sternly, with no weak sentiment, " Go, sin 
no more, lest a worse thing happen unto thee." But then 
it accepts every excuse, admits every palliation : looks upon 
this world of temptation and these frail human hearts of ours, 
not from the cell of a monk or the study of a recluse, but in 
a large, real way ; accepts the existence of sin as a fact, with- 
out affecting to be shocked or startled ; assumes that it must 
needs be that offenses come, and deals with them in a large 
noble way, as the results of a disease Avhich must be met 
—which should be, and which can be, cured. 



320 The Restoration of the Erring, 

I. The Christian view of other men's sin. 
II. The Christian power of restoration. 

I. The first thing noticeable in the apostle's view of sin 
is, that he looks upon it as if it might be sometimes the 
result of a surprise. "If a man be overtaken in a fault." 
In the original it is anticipated^ taken suddenly in front. As 
if circumstances had been beforehand with the man : as if 
sin, supposed to be left far behind, had on a sudden got in 
front, tripped him up, or led him into ambush. 

All sins are not of this character. There are some which 
are in accordance with the general bent of our disposition, 
and the opportunity of committing them was only the first 
occasion for manifesting what was in the heart : so that if 
they had not been committed then, they probably would or 
must have been at some other time ; and looking back to 
them we have no right to lay the blame on circumstances — 
we are to accept the penalty as a severe warning meant to 
show what was in our hearts. 

There are other sins of a different character. It seems 
as if it were not in us to commit them. They were, so to 
speak, unnatural to us : you were going quietly on your 
way, thinking no evil, suddenly temptation, for which you 
were not prepared, presented itself, and before you knew 
where you were, you were in the dust, fallen. 

As, for instance, when a question is suddenly put to a 
man which never ought to have been put, touching a secret 
of his own or another's. Had he the presence of mind or 
adroitness, he might turn it aside, or refuse to reply. But 
being unprepared and accosted suddenly, he says hastily 
that which is irreconcilable with strict truth ; then, to sub- 
stantiate and make it look probable, misrepresents or invents 
something else ; and so he has woven round himself a mesh 
which will entangle his conscience through many a weary 
day and many a sleepless night. 

It is shocking, doubtless, to allow ourselves even to admit 
that this is possible; yet no one knowing human nature 
from men, and not from books, will deny that this might 
befall even a brave and true man. St. Peter was both ; yet 
this was his history. In a crowd, suddenly, the question was 
put directly, "This man also was with Jesus of Nazareth." 
Then came a prevarication — a lie; and yet another. This 
was a sin of surprise. He was overtaken in a fault. 

Every one of us admits the truth of this in his own case. 
Looking back to past life, he feels that the errors which 
have most terribly determined his destiny were the result 



The Restoration of the Erring, 321 

of mistake. Inexperience, a hasty promise, excess of trust, 
incaution, nay, even a generous devotion, have been fear- 
fully, and, as it seems to us, inadequately chastised. There 
may be some undue tenderness to ourselves when we thus 
palliate the past : still, a great part of such extenuation is 
only justice. 

I^ow the Bible simply requires that we should judge 
others by the same rule by which we judge ourselves. The 
law of Christ demands that what we plead in our own case, 
we should admit in the case of others. Believe that in this 
or that case which you judge so harshly, the heart, in its 
deeps, did not consent to sin, nor by preference love what is 
hateful; simply admit that such an one may have been 
overtaken in a fault. This is the large law of charity. 

1. Again, the apostle considers fault as that which has 
left a burden on the erring spirit. "Bear ye one another's 
burdens." 

For we can not say to the laws of God, I was overtaken. 
We live under stern and unrelenting laws, which permit no 
excuse, and never heard of a surprise. They never send a 
man who has failed once back to try a second chance. 
There is no room for a mistake ; you play against them for 
your life ; and they exact the penalty inexorably, " Every 
man must bear his own burden." Every law has its own 
appropriate penalty ; and the wonder of it is, that often the 
severest penalty seems set against the smallest transgression. 
We suffer more for our vices than our crimes ; we pay dearer 
for our imprudences than even for our deliberate wickedness. 

Let us examine this a little more closely. One burden 
laid on fault is that chain of entanglement which seems to 
drag down to fresh sins. One step necessitates many others. 
One fault leads to another, and crime to crime. The soul 
gravitates downward beneath its burden. It was profound 
knowledge indeed which prophetically refused to limit Peter's 
sin to once. " Verily I say unto thee .... thou shalt deny 
Me thrice." 

We will try to describe that sense of burden. A fault 
has the power sometimes of distorting life till all seems 
hideous and unnatural. A man who has left his proper 
nature, and seems compelled to say and do things unnatural 
and in false show, who has thus become untrue to himself, 
to him life and the whole universe becomes untrue. He can 
grasp nothing; he does not stand on fact ; he is living as in 
a dream — himself a dream. All is ghastly, unreal, spectral. 
A burden is on him as of a nightmare. He moves about in 
nothingness and shadows, as if he were not. His own exist' 



32 2 The Restoration of the Erring, 

ence swiftly passing might seem a phantom life, were it not 
for the corroding pang of anguish in his soul, for that at 
least is real ! 

2. Add to this, the burden of the heart weighing on 
itself 

It has been truly said that the human heart is like the 
millstone, which, if there be wheat beneath it, will grind to 
purposes of health ; if not, will grind still, at the will of the 
,wild wind, but on itself So does the heart wear out itself 
against its own thought. One fixed idea — one remembrance, 
and no other — one stationary, wearing anguish. This is 
remorse, passing into despair ; itself the goad to fresh and 
wilder crimes. 

The worst of such a burden is that it keeps down the soul 
from good. Many an ethereal spirit, which might have 
climbed the heights of holiness, and breathed the rare and 
difiicult air of the mountain-top, where the heavenliest spir- 
ituality alone can live, is weighed down by such a burden 
to the level of the lowest. If you know such an one, mark 
his history; without restoration, his career is done. That 
soul will not grow henceforth. 

3. The burden of a secret. 

Some here know the weight of an uncommunicated sin. 
They know how it lies like ice upon the heart. They know 
how dreadful a thing the sense of hypocrisy is ; the knowl- 
edge of inward depravity, while all without looks pure as 
snow to men. 

How heavy this weight may be, we gather from these 
indications. First, from this strange, psychological fact. A 
man with a guilty secret will tell out the tale of his crimes 
as under the personality of another; a mysterious necessity 
seems to force him to give it utterance — as in the old fable 
of him who breathed out his weighty secret to the reeds. A 
remarkable instance of this is afforded in the case of that 
murderer, who, from the richness of his gifts and the enor- 
mity of his crime, is almost a historical personage, who, 
having become a teacher of youth, was in the habit of nar- 
rating to his pupils the anecdote of his crime with all the 
circumstantial particularity of fact, but all the while under 
the guise of a pretended dream. Such men tread forever 
on the very verge of a confession : they seem to take a fear- 
ful pleasure in talking of their guilt, as if the heart could 
not bear its own burden, but must give it outness. 

Again, is it evidenced by the attempt to get relief in pro- 
fuse and general acknowledgments of guilt. They adopt 
the language of religion; they call themselves "vile dust 



Tlie Restoration of the Erring. 323 

and miserable sinners." The world takes generally what 
they mean particularly. But they get no relief, they only 
deceive themselves; for they have turned the truth itself 
into a falsehood, using true words which they know convey 
a false impression, and getting praise for humility instead of 
punishment for guilt. They have used all the effort, and 
suffered all the pang which it would have cost them to get 
real relief, and they have not got it ; and the burden unac- 
knowledged remains a burden still. 

The third indication we have of the heaviness of this bur- 
den is the commonness of the longing for confession. None 
but a minister of the Gospel can estimate this : he only who, 
looking round his congregation, can point to person after 
person whose wild tale of guilt or sorrow he is cognizant of 
• — who can remember how often similar griefs were trem- 
bling upon lips which did not unburden themselves — whose 
heart being the receptacle of the anguish of many, can judge 
what is in human hearts : he alone can estimate how much 
there is of sin and crime lying with the weight and agony 
of concealment on the spirits of our brethren. 

The fourth burden is an intuitive consciousness of the hid- 
den sins of others' hearts. 

\ To two states of soul it is given to detect the presence of 
evil : states the opposite of each other — innocence and guilt. 

It was predicted of the Saviour while yet a child, that by 
Him the thou^^hts of many hearts should be revealed ; the 
fulfillment of this was the history of His life. He went 
through the world, by His innate purity detecting the pres- 
ence of evil, as He detected the touch of her who touched 
His garment \n the crowd. 

Men, supposed spotless before, fell down before Him, 
crying, " Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord !" 
This, in a lower degree, is true of all innocence : you would 
think that onft who can deeply read the human heart and 
track its windings must be himself deeply experienced in 
evil. But it is not so — at least not always. Purity can 
detect the presence of the evil which it does not understand : 
just as the dove which has never seen a hawk trembles at 
its presence ; and just as a horse rears uneasily when the 
wild beast unknown and new to it is near, so innocence 
understands, yet understands not the meaning of the unholy 
look, the guilty tone, the sinful manner. It shudders and 
shrinks from it by a power given to it, like that which God 
has conferred on the unreasoning mimosa. Sin gives the 
same power, but differently. Innocence apprehends the ap- 
proach of evil by the instinctive tact of contrast \ guilt, b^ 



324 The Restoration of the Erring, 

the instinctive consciousness of similarity. It is the pro 
found truth contained in the history of the Fall. The eyes 
are opened ; the knowledge of good and evil has come. 
The soul knows its own nakedness, but it knows also the 
nakedness of all other souls which have sinned after the si- 
militude of its own sin. 

Very marvellous is that test-power of guilt : it is vain to 
think ot eluding its fine capacity of penetration. Intimations 
of evil are perceived and noted, when to other eyes all seems 
pure. The dropping of an eye, the shunning of a subject, 
the tremulousness of a tone, the peculiarity of a subterfuge, 
will tell the tale. " These are tendencies like mine, and here 
is a spirit conscious as my own is conscious." 

This dreadful burden the Scriptures call the knowledge 
of good and evil : can we not all remember the salient sense 
of happiness which we had when all was innocent — when 
crime was the tale of some far distant hemisphere, and the 
guilt we heard of was not suspected in the hearts of the beings 
around us ? and can we not recollect, too, how by our own 
sin, or the cognizance of others' sin, there came a something 
which hung the heavens with shame and guilt, and all 
around seemed laden with evil ? This is the worst burden 
that comes from transgression : loss of faith in human good- 
ness ; the being sentenced to go through life haunted with a 
presence from which we can not escape ; the presence of 
evil in the hearts of all that we approach. 

II. The Christian power of restoration : " Ye which are 
spiritual, restore such an one." 

First, then, restoration is possible. That is a Christian 
fact. Moralists have taught us what sin is ; they have ex- 
plained how it twines itself into habit ; they have shown us 
its ineffaceable character. It was reserved for Christianity 
to speak of restoration. Christ, and Christ onl}^, has revealed 
that he who has erred may be restored, and made pure and 
clean and whole again. 

Next, however, observe that this restoration is accomplished 
by men. Causatively, of course, and immediately, restoration 
is the work of Christ and of God the Spirit. Mediately and 
inetrumentally, it is the work of men. ''^ Brethren^ .... re- 
store such an one." God has given to man the power of 
elevating his brother man. He has conferred on His Church 
the power of the keys to bind and loose, " Whosesoever sins 
ye remit, tliey are remitted ; and whosesoever sins ye retain, 
thoy are retained." It is therefore in tlie power of man, by 
hie conduct, to restore his brother, or to hinder his restora 



The Restoration of the Erring, 325 

tion. He may loose him from his sins, or retain their power 
upon his soul. 

Now the words of the text confine us to two modes in 
which this is done : by sympathy and by forgiveness. " Bear 
ye one another's burdens." 

By sympathy. We Protestants have one unvarying sneer 
ready for the system of the Romish confessional. They con- 
fess, we say, for the sake of absolution, that absolved they 
may sin again. A shallow, superficial sneer, as all sneers 
are. In that craving of the heart which gives the system of 
the confessional its dangerous power, there is something far 
more profound than any sneer can fathom. It is not the 
desire to sin again that makes men long to unburden their 
conscience, but it is the yearning to be true, which lies at 
the bottom, even of the most depraved hearts, to appear 
what they are, and to lead a false life no longer ; and besides 
this, it is the desire of sympathy. For this comes out of that 
dreadful sense of loneliness which is the result of sinning ; — 
the heart severed from God, feels severed from all other 
hearts : goes alone as if it had neither part nor lot w^Ith other 
men ; itself a shadow among shadows. And its craving is 
for sympathy : it wants some human heart to know what it 
feels. Thousands upon thousands of laden hearts around us 
are crying. Come and bear my burden with me ; and observe 
here, the apostle says, " Bear ye one another's burdens." 
Nor let the priest bear the burdens of all : that were most 
unjust. Why should the priest's heart be the common re- 
ceptacle of all the crimes and wickedness of a congregation ? 
*' Bear ye one another's burdens." 

Again, by forgiveness. There is a truth in the doctrine 
of absolution. God has given to man the power to absolve 
his brother, and so restore him to himself The forgiveness 
of man is an echo and an earnest of God's forgiveness. He 
whom society has restored realizes the possibility of restora- 
tion to God's favor. Even the mercifulness of one good 
man sounds like a voice of pardon from heaven: just as the 
power and the exclusion of men sound like a knell of hope- 
lessness, and do actually bind the sin upon the soul. The 
man whom society will not forgive nor restore is driven into 
recklessness. This is the true Christian doctrine of absolu- 
tion, as expounded by the Apostle Paul, 2 Cor. ii. 7-10 : the 
degrading power of severity, the restoring power of pardon, 
vested in the Christian community, the voice of the minister 
being but their voice. 

Now, then, let us inquire into the Christianity of our so* 
ciety. Restoration is the essential w^ork of Christianity 



326 The Restoration of the Erring, 

The Gospel is the declaration of God's sympathy and God'a 
pardon. In these two particulars, then, what is our right to 
be called a Christian community ? 

Suppose that a man is overtaken in a fault. What does 
he, or what shall he do ? Shall he retain it unacknowledged, 
or oro throuojh life a false man ? God forbid. Shall he then 
acknowledge it to his brethren, that they by sympathy and 
merciful caution may restore him ? Well, but is it not cer- 
tain that it is exactly from those to whom the name of 
" brethren " most peculiarly belongs that he will not receive 
assistance ? Can a man in mental doubt go to the members 
of the same religious communion ? Does he not know that 
they precisely are the ones who will frown upon his doubts, 
and proclaim his sins? Will a clergyman unburden his 
mind to his brethren in the ministry ? Are they not in their 
official rigor the least capable of largely understanding him ? 
If a woman be overtaken in a fault, will she tell it to a sis- 
ter-woman ? Or does she not feel instinctively that her sis- 
ter-woman is ever the most harsh, the most severe, and the 
most ferocious judge ? 

Well, you sneer at the confessional ; you complain that 
mistaken ministers of the Church of England are restoring it 
amongst us. But who are they that are forcing on the con- 
fessional? who drive laden and broken hearts to pour out 
their long pent-up sorrows into any ear that will receive 
them? I say it is we: we by our uncharitableness ; we by 
our want of sympathy and unmerciful behavior ; we by the 
unchristian way in which we break down the bridge behind 
the penitent, and say, " On, on in sin — there is no returning." 

Finally, the apostle tells us the spirit in which this is to 
be done, and assigns a motive for the doing it. The mode 
is, " in the spirit of meekness." For Satan can not cast out 
Satan. Sin can not drive out sin. For instance, my anger 
can not drive out another man's covetousness ; my petulance 
or sneer can not expel another's extravagance. The meek- 
ness of Christ alone has power. The charity which desires 
another's goodness above his well-being, that alone succeeds 
in the work of restoration. 

The motive is, " considering thyself, lest thou also be 
tempted." For sin is the result of inclination or weakness, 
combined with opportunity. It is therefore in a degree the 
offspring of circumstances. Go to the hulks, the jail, the 
penitentiary, the penal colony, statistics will almost mark 
out for you beforehand the classes which have furnished the 
inmates, and the exact proportion of the delinquency of each 
class. You will not find the wealthy there, nor the noble. 



Christ the Son, 327 

nor those guarded b j the fences of s^ocial life, but the poor, 
and the uneducated, and the frail, and the defenseless. Can 
you gravely surmise that this regular tabulation depends 
upon the superior virtue of one class compared with others ? 
Or must you admit that the majority at least of those who 
have not fallen are safe because they were not tempted? 
Well, then, when St. Paul says, " considering thyself, lest 
thou also be tempted," it is as if he had written. Proud Phar- 
isee of a man, complacent in thine integrity, who thankest 
God that thou art "not as other men are, extortioners, 
unjust, or as this publican," hast thou gone through the ter- 
rible ordeal and come off with unscathed virtue? Or art 
thou in all these points simply untried ? Proud Pharisee of 
a w^oman, who passest by an erring sister with a haughty 
look of conscious superiority, dost thou know what tempta- 
tion is, with strong feeling and mastering opportunity ? 
Shall the rich-cut crystal which stands on the table of the 
wealthy man, protected from dust and injury, boast that it 
has escaped the flaws, and the cracks, and the fractures 
which the earthen jar has sustained, exposed and subjected 
to rough and general uses? Oh man or woman ! thou who 
wouldst be a Pharisee, consider, oh consider thyself, lest 
thou also be tempted. 



XI. 
CHRIST THE SOK 



" God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto 
the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his 
Son."— Heb. i. 1, 2. 

Two critical remarks. 

1. " Sundry times " — more literally, sundry portions — sec- 
tions, not of time, but of the matter of the revelation. God 
gave His revelation in parts, piecemeal, as you teach a child 
to spell a word — letter by letter, syllable by syllable — ad- 
ding all at last together. God had a Word to spell — His own 
name. By degrees He did it. At last it came entire. The 
Word was made flesh. 

2. " His Son," more correctly, " a Son " — for this is the 
very argument. Not that God now spoke by Christ, but 
that whereas once He spoke by prophets, now He spoke by 
a Son. The filial dispensation was the last. 

This epistle was addressed to Chi-istians on the verge of 



328 Christ the Son, 

apostasy. See those passages : " It is impossible for those 
who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly- 
gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have 
tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world 
to come, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto re- 
pentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God 
afresh, and put Him to an open shame." " Cast not away 
your confidence." "We are made partakers of Christ, if we 
hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end." 

Observe what the danger was. Christianity had disap- 
pointed them — they had not found in it the rest they antici- 
pated. They looked back to the Judaism they had left, and 
saw a splendid temple-service, a line of priests, a visible tem- 
ple witnessing of God's presence, a religion which was un- 
questionably fertile in prophets and martyrs. They saw 
these pretensions and wavered. 

But this was all on the eve of dissolution. The Jewish 
earth and heavens, i. 6., the Jewish Commonwealth and 
Church, were doomed and about to pass away. The writer 
of this epistle felt that their hour was come ;* and if their re- 
ligion rested on nothing better than this, he knew that in 
the crash religion itself would go. To return to Judaism 
was to go down to atheism and despair. 

Reason alleged — they had contented themselves with a 
superficial view of Christianity ; they had not seen how it 
was interwoven with all their own history, and how it alone 
explained that history. 

Therefore in this epistle the writer labors to show that 
Christianity was the fulfillment of the idea latent in Judaism: 
that from the eai'liest times, and in every institution, it was 
implied. In the monarchy, in prophets, in sabbath-days, in 
psalms, in the priesthood, and in temple-services, Christianity 
lay concealed ; and the dispensation of a Son was the realiza- 
tion of what else was shadow. He therefore alone who ad- 
hered to Christ was the true Jew, and to apostatize from 
Christianity was really to apostatize from true Judaism. 

I am to show, then, that the manifestation of God through 
a Son was implied, not realized, in the earlier dispensation. 

"Sundry portions" of this truth are instanced in the epis- 
tle. The mediatorial dispensation of Moses — the gift of 
Canaan — the Sabbath, etc. At present I select these : 

I. The preparatory Dispensation. 
II. The filial and final Dispensation. 

L It was implied, not fulfilled in the kingly office. Three 

* See chap. xii. 2G, 27. 



Christ the Son, 329 

Psalms are quoted, all referring to kingship. In the 2d 
Psalm it was plain that a true idea of a king was only fulfill- 
ed in one who was a son of God. The Jewish king was king 
only so far as he held from God : as His image, the repre- 
sentative of the Fountain of law and majesty. To Him God 
hath said, " Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee." 
The 45th Psalm is a bridal hymn, composed on the marriage 
of a Jewish king. Startling language is addressed to him. 
He is called God — Lord. " Thy throne, God^ is for ever 
and ever." The bride is invited to worship him as it were a 
God : " He is thy Lord, and worship thou Him." No one is 
surprised at this who remembers that Moses was said to be 
made a God to Aaron. Yet it is startling, almost blasphem- 
ous, unless there be a deeper meaning implied — the divine 
character of the real king. 

In the 110th Psalm a new idea is added. The true king 
must be a priest. " Thou art a priest forever, after the or- 
der of Melchizedek. This was addressed to the Jewish king ; 
but it implied that the ideal king, of which he was for the 
time the representative, more or less truly, is one who at the 
same time sustains the highest religious character, and the 
highest executive authority. 

Again, David was emphatically the type of the Jewish re- 
gal idea. David is scarcely a personage, so entirely does he 
pass in Jewish forms of thought into an ideal sovereign — 
" the sure mercies of David." David is the name, therefore, 
for the David which was to be. Now David was a wander- 
er, kingly still, ruling men and gaining adherents by force of 
inward royalty. Thus in the Jewish mind the kingly office 
disengaged itself from outward pomp and hereditary right 
as mere accidents, and became a personal reality. The king 
was an idea. 

Further still. The epistle extends this idea to man. The 
psalm had ascribed (Ps, viii. 6) kingly qualities and rule to 
manhood — rule over the creation. Thus the idea of a king 
belonged properly to humanity; to the Jewish king as the 
representative of humanity. 

Yet even in collective humanity the royal character is not 
realized. " We see not," says the epistle, " all things as yet 
put under him " — man. 

Collect, then, these not-ions. The true king of men is a 
Son of God : one who is to his fellow-men, God and Lord, as 
the Jewish bride was to feel her royal husband to be to her 
— one who is a priest — one who may be poor and exiled, yet 
not less royal. 

Say, then, whence is this idea fulfilled by Judaism i^ To 



330 Christ the Son, 

which of the Jewish kings can it be applied, except with in*, 
finite exaggeration ? To David ? Why, the Redeemer 
shows the insuperable difficulty of this. " How then doth 
David in Spirit call him," ^. e., the king of whom he was 
writing, " Lord, saying, the Lord said unto my Lord^ sit thou 
on my right hand, until I make thy enemies thy footstool?" 
David writing of himself, yet speaks there in the third per- 
son, projecting himself outward as an object of contempla- 
tion, an idea. 

Is it fulfilled in the human race ? " We see not yet all 
things put under him." Then the writer goes on : " But we 
see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for 
the sufiering of death, crowned with glory and honor ; that 
He by the grace of God should taste death for every man." 
In Jesus of Nazareth alone all these fragments, these sundry 
portions of the revealed idea of royalty met. 

n. Christianity was implied in the race of prophets. 

The second class of quotations refer to the prophets' life 
and history (Heb. ii. 11-14; Psalm xxii. 22; Psalm xviii. 2; 
Isaiah xii. 2 ; Isaiah viii. 18). Remember what the prophets 
were. They were not merely predictors of the future. 
Nothing destroys the true conception of the prophets' office 
more than those popular books in which their mission is cer- 
tified by curious coincidences. For example, if it is predict- 
ed that Babylon shall be a desolation, the haunt of wild 
beasts, etc., then some traveller has seen a lion standing on 
Birs Nimroud ; or if the fisherman is to dry his nets on Tyre, 
simply expressing its destruction thereby, the commentator 
is not easy till he finds that a net has been actually seen dry- 
ing on a rock. But this is to degrade the prophetic office to 
a level with Egyptian palmistry : to make the prophet like 
an astrologer, or a gypsy fortune-teller — one who can pre- 
dict destinies and draw horoscopes. But, in truth, the first 
office of the prophet was with the present. He read eternal 
principles beneath the present and the transitory, and in 
|doing this, of course, he prophesied the future ; for a princi- 
ple true to-day is true forever. But this was, so to speak, 
an accident of his office, not its essential feature. If, for 
instance, he read in the voluptuousness of Babylon the se- 
cret of Babylon's decay, he also read by anticipation the 
doom of Corinth, of London, of all cities in Babylon's 
state; or if Jerusalem's fall was predicted, in it all such 
judgment comings were foreseen ; and the language is true 
of the fall of the world : as truly, or more so, than that of 
Jerusalem. A philosopher saying in the present tense the 



Christ the Son. 2i2>^ 

law by which comets move, predicts all possible cometary 
movements. 

Now the prophet's life, almost more than his words, was 
predictive. The writer of this epistle lays down a great prin- 
ciple respecting the prophet : " Both he that sanctifieth and 
they who are sanctified are all of one." It was the very 
condition of his inspiration that he should be one with the 
people. So far from making him superhuman, it made him 
more man. He felt with more exquisite sensitiveness all that 
belongs to man, else he could not have been a prophet. His 
insight into things was the result of that very weakness, sen- 
sitiveness, and susceptibility so tremblingly alive. He burned 
with their thoughts, and expressed them. He was obliged 
by the very sensitiveness of his humanity to have a more 
entire dependence and a more perfect sympathy than other 
men. The sanctifying prophet was one with those whom he 
sanctified. Hence he uses those expressions quoted from 
Isaiah and the Psalms above. 

He was more man, just because more divine — more a son 
of man, because more a son of God. He was peculiarly the 
suffering Israelite : His countenance marred more than the 
sons of men. Hence we are told the prophets searched 
" what, or what manner of time, the Spirit of Christ which 
was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the 
sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow." 
Observe, it was a spirit in them, their own lives witnessing 
mysteriously of what the perfect Humanity must be su^ 
fering. 

Thus, especially, the 53d chapter of Isaiah was spoken orig- 
inally of the Jewish nation — of the prophet as peculiarly the 
Israelite ; and it is no wonder the eunuch asked Philip in per- 
plexity, "Of whom doth the prophet say this — of himself or 
some other man ?" The truth is, he said it of himself, but 
prophetically of Humanity ; true of him, most true of the 
highest Humanity. Here, then, was a new " portion" of the 
revelation. The prophet rebuked the king, often opposed 
the priest, but was one with the people. " He that sancti- 
fieth and they who are sanctified are all of one." 

If, then. One had come claiming to be the Prophet of the 
race, and was a sufferer, claiming to be the Son of God, and 
yet peculiarly man ; the son of man : the son of man just be- 
cause the Son of God : more Divine, because more human : 
then this was only what the whole race of Jewish prophets 
should have prepared them for. God had spoken by the 
prophets. That God had now spoken by a Son in whom the 
idea of the true prophet was realized in its entireness. 



332 Christ the Son. 

Ill The priesthood continued this idea latent. The writer 
of this epistle saw three elements in the priestly idea : 1. That 
he should be ordained for men in things pertaining to God; 
2. That he should oifer gifts and sacrifices ; 3. That he should 
be called by God, not be a mere self-asserter. 

1. Ordained for men. Remark here the true idea con- 
tained in Judaism, and its difi*erence from the heathen no- 
tions. In Heathenism the priest was of a difierent race — sep- 
arate from his fellows. In Judaism he was ordained for men ; 
their representative ; constituted in their behalf The Jew- 
ish priest represented the holiness of the nation ; he went into 
the Holy of Holies, showing it. But this great idea was only 
implied, not fulfilled in the Jewish priest. He was only by a 
fiction the representative of holiness. Holy he was not. He 
only entered into a fictitious Holy of Holies. If the idea 
were to be ever real, it must be in One who should be act- 
ually what the Jewish priest was by a figment, and who 
should carry our humanity into the real Holy of Holies — the 
presence of God ; thus becoming our Invisible and Eternal 
Priest. 

Next it was implied that his call must be Divine. But in 
the 1 1 0th Psalm a higher call is intimated than that Divine 
call which was made to the Aaronic priesthood by a regular 
succession, or, as it is called in the epistle, " the law of a car- 
nal commandment." Melchizedek's call is spoken of The 
king is called a priest after his order. Not a derived or he- 
reditary priesthood ; not one transmissible, beginning and 
ending in himself (Heb. vii. 1-3), but a priesthood, in other 
words, of character, of inward right: a call internal, hence 
more Divine ; or, as the writer calls it, a priest " after the 
power of an endless life." This was the idea for which the 
Jewish psalms themselves ought to have prepared the Jew. 

Again, the priests offered gifts and sacrifices. Distinguish: 
Gifts were thank-ofiei-ings ; first-fruits of harvest, vintage, 
etc., a man's best ; testimonies of infinite gratefulness, and 
expressions of it. But sacrifices were different : they implied 
a sense of unworthiness: that sense which conflicts with the 
idea of any right to offer gifts. 

Now the Jewish Scriptures themselves had explained this 
subject, and this instinctive feeling of unworthiness for which 
sacrifice found an expression. Prophets and psalmists had 
felt that no sacrifice was perfect which did not reach the con- 
science (Ps. li. 16, 17), for instance; also Heb. x. 8-12. No 
language could more clearly show that the spiritual Jew dis- 
cerned that entire surrender to the Divine Will is the only 
perfect sacrifice, the ground of all sacrifices, and that whicb 



Worldliness. 333 

alone imparts to it a significance. Not the mere sacrifice of 
victims. . . . "Then said I, Lo, I come to do Thy will, O 
God." That is the sacrifice which God wills. 

I say it firmly — all other notions of sacrifice are false. 
Whatsoever introduces the conception of vindictiveness or 
retaliation — whatever speaks of appeasing fury — whatever 
estimates the value of the Saviour's sacrifice by the "penalty 
paid" — whatever dififers from these notions of sacrifice con- 
tained in psalms and prophets — is borrowed from the bloody 
shambles of Heathenism, and not from Jewish altars. 

This alone makes the worshij)per perfect as pertaining to 
the conscience. He who can offer it in its entireness, He 
alone is the world's Atonement ; He in whose heart the Law 
was, and who alone of all mankind was content to do it, His 
sacrifice alone can be the sacrifice all-suflficient in the Fathers 
sight as the proper sacrifice of humanity : He who through 
the Eternal Spirit ofiTered Himself without spot to God, He 
alone can give the Spirit which enables us to present our 
bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. He is 
the only High-priest of the universe. 



XII. 
WORLDLINESS. 

"If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. Fot 
all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and thr 
pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth 
away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for- 
ever,'' — 1 John ii. 15-17. 

Religion diflfers from morality in the value which it 
places on the affections. Morality requires that an act be 
done on principle. Religion goes deeper, and inquires into 
the state of the heart. The Church of Ephesus was unsus- 
pected in her orthodoxy, and unblemished in her zeal : but to 
the ear of him who saw the apocalyptic vision, a voice spake, 
''I have somewhat against thee in that thou hast left thy 
first love." 

In the eye of Christianity he is a Christian who loves the 
Father. He who loves the world may be in his way a good 
man, respecting whose eternal destiny we pronounce no 
opinion : but one of the children of the kingdom he is not. 

Now the boundary-lines of this love of the world, or 
worldliness, are exceedingly difiicult to define. Bigotry pro- 



00' 



Worldliness. 



nounces many things wrong which are harmless : laxity per- 
mits many which are by no means innocent : and it is a 
question perpetually put, a question miserably perplexing to 
those whose religion consists more in avoiding that which is 
wrong than in seeking that which is right, What is world- 
liness ? 

To that question we desire to find to-day an answer in the 
text; premising this, that our object is to put ourselves in 
possession of principles. For otherwise we shall only deal 
with this matter as empirics ; condemning this and approving 
that by opinion, but on no certain and intelligible ground: 
we shall but float on the unstable sea of opinion. 

We confine ourselves to two points. 

I. The nature of the forbidden world. 
n. The reason for which it is forbidden. 

I. The nature of the forbidden world. The first idea sug- 
gested by " the world " is this green earth, with its days and 
nights, its seasons, its hills and its valleys, its clouds and 
brightness. This is not the world the love of which is pro- 
hibited ; for to forbid the love of this would be to forbid the 
love of God. 

There are three ways in which we learn to know Him. 
First, by the working of our minds : love, justice, tender- 
ness. If we would know what they mean in God, we must 
gain the conception from their existence in ourselves. But 
inasmuch as humanity is imperfect in us, if we were to learn 
of God only from His image in ourselves, we should run the 
risk of calling the evil good, and the imperfect divine. 
Therefore He has given us, besides this, the representation of 
Himself in Christ, where is found the meeting-point of the 
Divine and the human, and in whose life the character of 
Deity is reflected as completely as the sun is seen in the 
depth of the still, untroubled lake. 

But there is a third way in which we attain the idea of 
God. This world is but manifested Deity — God shown to 
eye, and ear, and sense. This strange phenomenon of a 
world, what is it? All we know of it — all we know of mat- 
ter — is, that it is an assemblage of powers which produce in 
us certain sensations ; but what those powers are in them- 
selves we know not. The sensation of color, form, weight, 
we have ; but what it is which gives those sensations — in 
the language of the schools, what is the substratum which 
supports the accidents or qualities of Being — we can not tell. 
Speculative Philosophy replies, It is but our own selves be- 
coming conscious of themselves. We, in our own being, are 



Worldliness. 335 

the cause ot all phenomena. Positive Philosophy replies, 
What the Being of the world is we can not tell, we only 
know what it seems to us. Phenomena — appearance — be 
yond this we can not reach. Being itself is — and forever 
must be, unknowable. Religion replies, That something is 
God. The world is but manifested Deity. That which lies 
beneath the surface of all appearance, the cause of all mani- 
festation, is God. So that to forbid the love of all this 
world is to forbid the love of that by which God is known 
to us. The sounds and sights of this lovely world are but 
the drapery of the robe in which the Invisible has clothed 
Himself Does a man ask what this world is, and why man 
is placed in it ? It was that the invisible things of Him from 
the creation of the world might be clearly seen. Have we 
ever stood beneath the solemn vault of heaven when the 
stars were looking down in their silent splendor, and not felt 
an overpowei'ing sense of His eternity ? When the white 
lightning has quivered in the sky, has that told us nothing 
of power, or only something of electricity? Rocks and 
mountains, are they here to give us the idea of material mass- 
iveness, or to reveal the conception of the Strength of Israel? 
When we take up the page of past history, and read that 
wrong never prospered long, but that nations have drunk 
one after another the cup of terrible retribution, can we dis- 
miss all that as the philosophy of history, or shall we say 
that through blood, and war, and desolation we trace the 
footsteps of a presiding God, and find evidence that there 
sits at the helm of this world^s affairs a strict, and rigorous, 
and most terrible justice? To the eye that can see, to the 
heart that is not paralyzed, God is here. The warnings 
which the Bible utters against the things of this world bring 
no charge against the glorious world itself The world ia 
the glass through which we see the Maker. But what men 
do is this ; They put the dull quicksilver of their own selfish- 
ness behind the glass, and so it becomes not the transparent 
medium through which God shines, but the dead opaque 
which reflects back themselves. Instead of lying with open 
eye and heart to receive^ we project ourselves upon the world 
and give. So it gives us back our own false feelings and na^ 
ture. Therefore it brings forth thorns and thistles; there- 
fore it grows weeds — weeds to us; therefore the lightning 
bums with wrath, and the thunder mutters vengeance. By 
all which it comes to pass that the very manifestation of God 
has transformed itself: — the lust of the flesh, and the lust of 
the eye, and the pride of life ; and all that is in the world ii 
DO longer of the Father, but is of the world. 



3 3 C Worldliness, 

By the world again is sometimes meant the men that are 
in the world. And thus the command would run, Love not 
men, but love God. It has been so read. The Pharisees 
read it so of old. The property which natural affection de- 
manded for the support of parents, upon that they wrote 
" Corban," a gift for God, and robbed men that they might 
give to God. Yet no less than this is done whenever human 
affection is called idolatry. As if God were jealous of our 
love in the human sense of jealousy ; as if we could love God 
the more by loving man the less; as if it were not by loving 
our brother whom we have seen, that we approximate to- 
wards the love of God whom we have not seen. This is but 
the cloak for narrowness of heart. Men of withered affec- 
tions excuse their lovelessness by talking largely of the affec- 
tion due to God. Yet, like the Pharisees, the love on which 
Corban is written is never given to God, but really retained 
for self 

No, let a man love his neighbor as himself. Let him love 
his brother, sister, wife, with all the intensity of his heart's 
affection. This is not St. John's forbidden world. 

By the world is often understood the worldly occupation, 
trade or profession which a man exercises. And according- 
ly, it is no uncommon thing to hear this spoken of as some- 
thing which, if not actually anti-religious, is, so far as it goes, 
time taken away from the religious life. But when the man 
from whom the legion had been expelled asked Jesus for the 
precepts of a religious existence, the reply sent him back to 
home. His former worldliness had consisted in doing his world- 
ly duties ill — his future religiousness was to consist in doing 
those same duties better. A man's profession or trade is not 
only not incompatible with religion (provided it be a lawful 
one), it is his religion. And this is true even of those call- 
ings which at first sight appear to have in them something 
hard to reconcile with religiousness. For instance, the pro- 
fession of a lawyer. He is a worldling in it if he use it for 
some personal greed, or degrade it by chicanery. But in it- 
self it is an occupation which sifts right from wrong ; which, 
in the entangled web of human life, unwinds the meshes of 
error. He is by profession enlisted on the side of the right 
— directly connected with God, the central point of justice 
and truth. A nobler occupation need no man desire than to 
be a fellow-worker with God. Or take the soldier's trade — 
in this world generally a trade of blood, and revenge, and 
idle licentiousness. Rightly understood, what is it ? A sol- 
dier's whole life, whether he will or not, is an enunciation of 
the greatest of religious truth>^, the voluntary sacrifice of 



Worldliness, '^i'] 

one for the sake of many. In the detail of his existence, how 
abundant are the opportunities for the voluntary recognition 
of this. Opportunities such as that when the three strong 
men brake through the lines of the enemy to obtain the wa' 
ter for their sovereign's thirst — opportunities as when that 
same heroic sovereign poured the untasted water on the 
ground, and refused to drink because it was his soldiers' lives 
— he could not drink at such a price. Earnestness in a law- 
ful calling is not worldliness. A profession is the sphere of 
our activity. There is something sacred in work. To work 
in the appointed sphere is to be religious — as religious as to 
pray. This is not the forbidden world. 

Now to define what worldliness is. Remark, first, that it 
is determined by the spirit of a life, not the objects with which 
the life is conversant. It is not the "flesh," nor the "eye," 
nor " life," which are forbidden, but it is the " lust of the 
flesh," and the " lust of the eye," and the ^^ pride of life." It 
is not this earth, nor the men who inhabit it, nor the sphere 
of our legitimate activity, that we may not love, but the way 
in which the love is given which constitutes worldliness. 
Look into this a little closer. The lust of the flesh. Here is 
affection for the outward: pleasure, that which afifects the 
senses only : the flesh, that enjoyment which comes from the 
emotions of an hour, be it coarse or be it refined. The pleas- 
ure of wine or the pleasure of music, so far as it is only a 
movement of the flesh. Again, the lust of the eye. Here is 
affection for the transient, for the eye can only gaze on form 
and color — and these are things that do not last. Once 
more — the pride of life. Here is affection for the unreal. 
Men's opinion — the estimate which depends upon wealth, 
rank, circumstances. 

Worldliness then consists in these three things : Attach- 
ment to the outward — attachment to the transitory — attach- 
ment to the unreal : in opposition to love for the inward, the 
eternal, the true : and the one of these affections is necessari- 
ly expelled by the other. If a man love the world, the love 
of the Father is not in him. But let a man once feel the 
power of the kingdom that is within, and then the love fades 
of that emotion whose life consists only in the thrill of a 
nerve, or the vivid sensation of a feeling : he loses his happi- 
ness, and wins his blessedness. Let a man get but one glimpse 
of the King in His beauty, and then the forms and shapes of 
things here are to him but the types of an invisible loveli- 
ness : types which he is content should break and fade. Let 
but a man feel truth — that goodness is greatr,ess — that there 
is no other greatness — and then the degrading reverence 



33^ Worldliness, 

with which the titled of this world bow before wealthy and 
the ostentation with which the rich of this world profess 
their familiarity with title : all the pride of life, what is it to 
him ? The love of the inward — everlasting, real — the love, 
that is, of the Father, annihilates the love of the world. 

n. We pass to the reasons for which the love of the world 
is forbidden. 

The first reason assigned is, that the love of the world is 
incompatible with the love of God. If any man love the 
worldj the love of the Father is not in him. Now what we 
observe in this is, that St. John takes it for granted that we 
must love something. If not the love of the Father, then of 
necessity the love of the world. Love misplaced, or love 
rightly placed — you have your choice between these two : 
you have not your choice between loving God or nothing. 
l^o man is sufficient for himself. Every man must go out of 
himself for enjoyment. Something in this universe besides 
himself there must be to bind the affections of every man. 
There is that within us which compels us to attach ourselves 
to something outward. The choice is not this : love, or be 
without love. You can not give .the pent-up steam its choice 
of moving or not moving. It must move one way or the 
other : the right way or the wrong way. Direct it rightly, 
and its energy rolls the engine-wheels smoothly on their 
track : block up its passage, and it bounds away, a thing of 
madness and ruin. Stop it you can not ; it will rather burst. 
So it is with our hearts. There is a pent-up energy of love, 
gigantic for good or evil. Its right way is in the direction 
of our Eternal Father ; and then, let it boil and pant as it 
will, the course of the man is smooth. Expel the love of 
God from the bosom — what then? Will the passion that is 
within cease to burn ? Nay. Tie the mun down — let there 
be no outlet for his affections — let him attach himself to noth- 
ing, and become a loveless spirit in this universe, and then 
there is what we call a broken heart : the steam bursts the 
machinery that contains it. Or else let him take his course, 
unfettered and free, and then we have the riot of worldliness 
— a man with strong affections thrown off the line, tearing 
himself to pieces, and carrying desolation along with him. 
Let us comprehend our own nature, ourselves, and our des- 
tinies. God is our rest, the only one that can quench the 
fever of our desire. God in Christ is what we want. When 
men quit that, so that " tlie love of the Father is not in them," 
then they must perforce turn aside : the nobler heart to break 
with disappointment — the moaner heart to love the world 



Wofldliness. 339 

instead, and sate ana satisfy itself, as best it may, on things 
that perish in the using. Herein lies the secret of our being, 
in this world of the affections. This explains why our no- 
blest feelings lie so close to our basest — why the noblest so 
easily metamorphose themselves into the basest. The heart 
which was made large enough for God wastes itself upon the 
world. 

The second reason which the apostle gives for not squan- 
dering affection on the world is its transitoriness. Now this 
transitoriness exists in two shapes. It is transitory in itself 
— the world passeth away. It is transitory in its power of 
exciting desire — the lust thereof passeth away. 

It is a twice-told tale that the world is passing away from 
us, and there is very little new to be said on the subject. 
God has written it on every page of His creation that there 
is nothing here which lasts. Our affections change. The 
friendships of the man are not the friendships of the boy. 
Our very selves are altering. The basis of our being may 
remain, but our views, tastes, feelings are no more our former 
self than the oak is the acorn. The very face of the visible 
world is altering around us : we have the gray mouldering 
ruins to tell of what was once. Our laborers strike their 
ploughshares against the foundations of buildings which 
once echoed to human mirth — skeletons of men, to whom 
life once was dear — urns and coins that remind the antiqua- 
rian of a magnificent empire. To-day the shot of the enemy 
defaces and blackens monuments and venerable temples 
w^hich remind the Christian that into the deep silence of 
eternity the Roman world, which was in its vigor in the 
days of John, has passed away. And so things are going. 
It is a work of weaving and unweaving. All passes. Names 
that the world heard once in thunder are scarcely heard at 
the end of centuries : good or bad, they pass. A few years 
ago, and we were not. A few centuries farther, and we 
reach the age of beings of almost another race. Nimrod 
was the conqueror and scourge of his far-back age. Tubal 
Cain gave to the world the iron which was the foundation 
of every triumph of men over nature. We have their 
names now. But the philologist is uncertain whether the 
name of the first is real or mythical, and the traveller exca- 
vates the sand-mounds of Nineveh to wonder over the rec- 
ords which he can not decipher. Tyrant and benefactor, 
both are gone. And so all things are moving on to the last 
fire which shall wrap the world in conflagration, and make 
all that has been the recollection of a dream. This is the 
history of the world, and all that is in it. It passes while we 



340 Worldliness. 

look at it. Like as when you watch the melting tints of th« 
evening sky — purple-crimson, gorgeous gold, a few pulsa^ 
tions of quivering light, and it is all gone : " We are such 
stuff as dreams are made of." 

The other aspect of this transitoriness is, that the lust of 
the world passeth away. By which the apostle seems to re- 
mind us of that solemn truth that, fast as the world is fleei^ 
ing from us, faster still does the taste for its enjoyments fleet ; 
fast as the brilliancy fades from earthly things, faster still 
does the eye become wearied of straining itself upon them. 

Now there is one way in which this takes place — by a man 
becoming satiated with the world. There is something in 
earthly rapture which cloys. And when we drink deep of 
pleasure, there is left behind something of that loathing 
which follows a repast on sweets. When a boy sets out in 
life, it is all fresh — freshness in feeling — zest in his enjoy- 
ment — purity in his heart. Cherish that, my young breth- 
ren, while you can ; lose it, and it never comes again. It is 
not an easy thing to cherish it, for it demands restraint in 
pleasure, and no young heart loves that. Religion has only 
calm, sober, perhaps monotonous pleasures to offer at first. 
The deep rapture of enjoyment comes in after-life. And 
that will not satisfy the young heart. Men will know what 
pleasure is, and they drink deep. Keen delight — feverish 
enjoyment — that is what you long for: and these emotions 
lose their delicacy and their relish, and will only come at the 
bidding of gross excitements. The ecstasy which once rose 
to the sight of the rainbow in the sky, or the bright brook, 
or the fresh morning, comes languidly at last only in the 
crowded midnight room, or the excitement of commercial 
speculation, or beside the gaming-table, or amidst the fever 
of politics. It is a spectacle for men and angels, when a 
man has become old in feeling and worn-out before his time. 
Know we none such among our own acquaintance? Have 
the young never seen those aged ones who stand amongst 
them in their pleasures, almost as if to warn them of what 
they themselves must come to at last? Have they never 
marked the dull and sated look that they cast upon the 
whole scene, as upon a thing which they would fain enjoy 
and can not ? Know you what you have been looking on ? 
A sated worldling — one to whom pleasure was rapture once, 
as it is to you now. Tliirty years more, that look and that 
place will be yours : and that is the way the world rewards 
its veterans ; it chains them to it after the " lust of the 
world " has passed away. 

Or this may be done by a discovery of the unsatisfactori 



Worldliness. 341 

ness of the world. That is a discovery not made by every 
man. But there are some at least who have learned it bit- 
terly, and that without the aid of Christ. Some there are 
who would not live over this past life again even if it were 
possible. Some there are who would gladly have done with 
the whole thing at once, and exchange — oh ! how joyfully — ■ 
the garment for the shroud. And some there are who cling 
to life, not because life is dear, but because the future is 
dark, and they tremble somewhat at the thought of entering 
it. Clinging to life is no proof that a man is still longing 
for the world. We often cling to life the more tenaciously 
as years go on. The deeper the tree has struck its roots into 
the ground, the less willing is it to be rooted up. But there 
is many a one who so hangs on just because he has not the 
desperate hardihood to quit it, nor faith enough to be " will- 
ing to depart." The world and he have understood each 
other; he has seen through it; he has ceased to hope any 
thing from it. The love of the Father is not in him, but 
" the lust of the world " has passed away. 

Lastly, a reason for unlearning the love of the world is the 
solitary permanence of Christian action. In contrast with 
the fleetingness of this world, the apostle tells us of the sta- 
bility of labor. "He that doeth the will of God abideth for- 
ever." And let us mark this. Christian life is action : not 
a speculating, not a debating, but a doing. One thing, and 
only one, in this world has eternity stamped upon it. Feel- 
ings pass ; resolves and thoughts pass ; opinions change. 
What you have done lasts — lasts in you. Through ages, 
through eternity, what you have done for Christ, that, and 
only that, you are. " They rest from their labors," saith the 
Spirit, " and their works do follow them." If the love of the 
Father be in us, where is the thing done which we have to 
show ? You think justly — feel rightly — yes — but your 
work ? — produce it. Men of wealth, men of talent, men of 
leisure, what are you doing in God's world for God ? 

Observe, however, to distinguish between the act and the 
actor : It is not the thing done, but the doer Avho lasts. 
The thing done often is a failure. The cup given in the 
name of Christ may be given to one unworthy of it ; but 
think ye that the love with which it was given has passed 
away ? Has it not printed itself indelibly in the character 
by the very act of giving ? Bless, and if the Son of peace 
be there, your act succeeds ; but if not, your blessing shall 
return unto you again. In other words, the act may fail, but 
the doer of it abideth forever. 

We close this subject with two practical truths. Let ua 



342 Worldliness, 

learn from earthly changefulness a lesson of cheerful activl 
ty. The world has its way of looking at all this, but it ia 
not the Christian's way. There has been nothing said to- 
day that a worldly moralist has not already said a thousand 
times far better. The fact is a world-fact. The application 
is a Christian one. Every man can be eloquent about the 
nothingness of time. But the application ! " Let us eat 
and drink, for to-morrow we die?" That is one application. 
Let us sentimentalize and be sad in this fleeting world, and 
talk of the instability of human greatness, and the transi- 
toriness of human aff*ection? Those are the only two appli- 
cations the world knows. They shut out the recollection 
and are merry, or they dwell on it and are sad. Christian 
brethren, dwell on it and be happy. This world is not 
yours ; thank God it is not. It is dropping away from you 
like worn-out autumn leaves ; but beneath it, hidden in it, 
there is another world lying as the flower lies in the bud. 
That is your world, which must burst forth at last into eter- 
nal luxuriance. All you stand on, see, and love, is but the 
husk of something better. Things are passing ; our friends 
are dropping ofi" from us ; strength is giving way ; our relish 
for earth is going, and the world no longer wears to our 
hearts the radiance that once it wore. We have the same 
sky above us, and the same scenes around us ; but the fresh- 
ness that our hearts extracted from every thing in boyhood, 
and the glory that seemed to rest once on earth and life have 
faded away forever. Sad and gloomy truths to the man who 
is going down to the grave with his work undone. Not sad 
to the Christian, but rousing, exciting, invigorating. If it be 
the eleventh hour, we have no time for folding of the hands : 
we will work the faster. Through the changefulness of life 
- — through the solemn tolling of the bell of Time, which tells 
us that another, and another, and another, are gone before 
us — through the noiseless rush of a world which is going down 
with gigantic footsteps into nothingness. Let not the Chris- 
tian slack his hand from work, for he that doeth the will of 
God may defy hell itself to quench his immortality. 

Finally, The love of this world is only unlearned by the 
love of the Father. It were a desolate thing, indeed, to for- 
bid the love of earth, if there were nothing to fill the vacant 
space in the heart. But it is just for this purpose, that a 
Bublimer aflection may find room, that the lower is to be ex- 
pelled. And there is only one way in which that higher love 
is learned. The cross of Christ is the measure of the love of 
God to us, and the measure of the meaning of man's existence. 

The measure is the love of God. Through the death-kneU 



The Sydeftham Palace^ Etc, 343 

of a passirg universe God seems at least to speak to us in 
wrath. There is no doubt of what God means in the Cross. 
He means love. The measure of the meaning of man's exists 
ence. Measure all by the Cross. Do you want success ? 
The Cross is failure. Do you want a name? The Cross is 
infamy. Is it to be gay and happy that you live ? The Cross 
is pain and sharpness. Do you live that the will of God may 
be done — in you and by you, in life and death? Then, and 
only then, the Spirit of the Cross is in you. When once a 
man has learned that, the power of the world is gone ; and 
no man need bid him, in denunciation or in invitation, not to 
love the world. He can not love the world, for he has got 
an ambition above the world. He has planted his foot upon 
the Rock, and when all else is gone, he at least abides forever. 



XIII. 

THE SYDENHAM PALACE, AND THE RELIGIOUS 
NON-OBSERYANCE OF THE SABBATH. 

"One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every 
day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. He that 
regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord ; and he that regardeth not the 
day, to the Lord RTe ^th not regard it. He that eateth, eateth to the Lord, 
for he giveth God thanks ; and he that eateth not, to the Lord he eateth not, 
and giveth God thanks. " — Rom. xiv. 5, 6. 

The selection of this text is suggested by one of the cur- 
rent topics of the day. Lately projects have been devised, 
one of which in importance surpasses all the rest, for provide 
ing places of public recreation for the people : and it has 
been announced, with the sanction of government, that such 
a place will be held open during a part at least of the day of 
rest. By a large section of sincerely religious persons this 
announcement has been received with considerable alarm 
and strenuous opposition. It has seemed to them that such 
a desecration would be a national crime : for, holding the sab- 
bath to be God's sign between Himself and His people, they 
can not but view the desecration ot the sign as a forfeiture 
of His covenant, and an act which will assuredly call down 
national judgments. By the secular press, on the contrary, 
this proposal has been defended with considerable power. It 
has been maintained that the sabbath is a Jewish institu- 
tion ; in its strictness, at all events, not binding on a Chris- 
tian community. It has been urged with much force thaj 



344 ^'^^ Sydefzham Palace^ mid the 

we can not consistently refuse to concede to the pool man 
publicly, that right of recreation which privately the rich 
man has long taken without rebuke, and with no protest on 
the part of the ministers of Christ. And it has been said 
that such places of recreation will tend to humanize, which 
if not ideTitical with Christianizing the population, is at least 
a step towards it. 

Upon such a subject, where truth unquestionably does not 
iie upon the surface, it can not be out of place if a minister 
of Christ endeavors to direct the minds of his congregation 
towards the formation of an opinion ; not dogmatically, but 
humbly, remembering always that his own temptation is, 
from his very position as a clergyman, to view such matters, 
not so much in the broad light of the possibilities of actual 
life, as with the eyes of a recluse ; from a clerical and eccle- 
siastical, rather than from a large and human point of view. 
For no minister of Christ has a right to speak oracularly. 
All that he can pretend to do is to give his judgment, as one 
that has obtained mercy of the Lord, to be faithful. And on 
large national subjects there is perhaps no class so ill quali- 
fied to form a judgment with breadth as we, the clergy of 
the Church of England, accustomed as we are to move in the 
narrow circle of those who listen to us with forbearance and 
deference, and mixing but little in real life, till in our clois- 
tered and inviolable sanctuaries we are apt to forget that it 
is one thing to lay down rules for a religious clique, and an- 
other to legislate for a great nation. 

In the Church of Rome a controversy had arisen in the 
time of St. Paul, respecting the exact relation in which Chris- 
tianity stood to Judaism; and, consequently, the obligation 
of various Jewish institutions came to be discussed : among 
the rest the sabbath-day. One party maintained its abroga- 
tion, another its continued obligation. " One man esteemeth 
one day above another ; another esteemeth every day alike." 
Now it is remarkable that, in his reply, the Apostle Paul, al- 
though his own views upon the question were decided and 
strong, passes no judgment of censure upon the practice of 
either of these parties, but only blames the uncharitable 
spirit in Avhich the one "judged their brethren" as irrelig- 
ious, and the other " set at naught " their stricter brethren as 
superstitious. He lays down, however, two principles for the 
decision of the matter: the first being the rights of Christian 
conviction, or the sacredness of the individual conscience — ■ 
"Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind;" the 
second, a principle unsatisfactory enough, and surprising, no 
doubt, to both, that there is such a thing as reliirious observ 



Religious Non-Observance of the Sabbath. 345 

ance, and also such a thing as a religious non-observance of 
the day — " He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the 
Lord: and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he 
doth not regard it." I shall consider, 

L St. Paul's own view upon the question. 
IL His modifications of that view, in reference to separate 

cases. 

L Sto Paul's own view, '^o one, I believe, who would 
read St. Paul's own writings with unprejudiced mind could 
fail to come to the conclusion that he considered the sabbath 
abrogated by Christianity: not merely as modified in it8 
stringency, but as totally repealed. 

For example, see Colossians ii. 16, 17: observe, he counts 
the sabbath-day among those institutions of Judaism which 
were shadows, and of which Christ was the realization, the 
substance or " body ;" and he bids the Colossians remain in- 
different to the judgment which would be pronounced upon 
their non-observance of such days. "Let no man judge you 
with respect to ... . the sabbath-days." 

He is more decisive still in the text. For it has been con- 
tended that in the former passage, " sabbath-days " refers 
simply to the Jewish sabbaths, which were superseded by 
the Lord's day, and that the apostle does not allude at all to 
the new institution, which it is supposed had superseded it. 
Here, however, there can be no such ambiguity. " One man 
esteemeth every day alike;" and he only says, "let him be 
fully persuaded in his own mind." "Every" day must in- 
clude first days as well as last days of the week: Sundays as 
well as Saturdays. And again, he even speaks of scrupulous 
adherence to particular days, as if it were giving up the very 
principle of Christianity: "Ye observe days, and months, 
and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestow- 
ed upon you labor in vain." So that his objection was not 
to Jewish days, but to the very principle of attaching intrin- 
sic sacredness to any days. All forms and modes of particu- 
larizing the Christian life he reckoned as bondage under the 
elements or alphabet of the law. And this is plain from the 
nature of the case. He sti-uck not at a day, but at a princi- 
ple. Else, if with all this vehemence and earnestness, he only 
meant to establish a new set of days in the place of the old, 
there is no intelligible principle for which he is contending, 
and that earnest apostle is only a champion for one day in- 
stead of another — an asserter of the eternal sanctities of Sun- 
day, instead of the eternal sanctities of Saturday. Incredi* 
ble indeed, 



346 The Sydenham Palace, and the 

Let us then understand the principle on which he declared 
the repeal of the sabbath- He taught that the blood of 
Christ cleansed all things ; therefore there was nothing spe< 
dally clean. Christ had vindicated all for God ; therefore 
there was no one thing more God's than another. For to as- 
sert one thing as God's more than another, is by implicatioii 
to admit that other to be less God's. 

The blood of Christ had vindicated God's parental right to 
all humanity ; therefore there could be no peculiar people. 
" There is neither Jew nor Greek, circumcision nor uncircum- 
cision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond, nor free : but Christ is all, 
and in all." It had proclaimed God's property in all places; 
therefore there could be no one place intrinsically holier than 
another. No human dedication, no human consecration 
could localize God in space. Hence the first martyr quoted 
■from the prophet : " Howbeit the Most High dwelleth not in 
temples made with hands ; as saith the prophet, heaven is 
my throne, and earth is my footstool : w^hat house will ye 
build for me ? saith the Lord." 

Lastly, the Gospel of Christ had sanctified all time : hence 
no time could be specially God's. For to assert that Sunday 
is more God's day than Monday, is to maintain by implica- 
tion Monday is His less rightfully. 

Here, however, let it be observed, it is perfectly possible, 
and not at all inconsistent with this, that for human conveni- 
ence, and even human necessities, just as it became desirable 
to set apart certain places in which the noise of earthly busi- 
ness should not be heard for spiritual worship, so it should 
become desirable to set apart certaixi days for special wor- 
ship. Bat then all such were defensible on the ground of 
wise and Christian expediency alone. They could not be 
placed on the ground of a Divine statute or command. They 
rested on the authority of the Church of Christ ; and the 
power which had made could unmake them again. 

Accordingly in early, we can not say exactly how early 
times, the Church of Christ felt the necessity of substituting 
something in place of the ordinances which had been repeal- 
ed. And the Lord's day arose : not a day of compulsory 
rest ; not such a day at all as modern Sabbatarians suppose ; 
not a Jewish sabbath ; rather a day in many respects abso- 
lutely contrasted with the Jewish sabbath. 

For the Lord's day sprung, not out of a transference of the 
Jewish sabbath from Saturday to Sunday, but rather out of 
the idea of making the week an imitation of the life of Christ. 
With the early Christians, the great conception was that of 
following their crucified and risen Lord: they set, as it were, 



Religious Non-0 bserv mice of the Sabbath. 347 

the clock of Time to the epochs of his history. Friday repre- 
sented the Death in which all Christians daily die, and Sun- 
day the Resurrection in which all Christians daily rise to 
higher life. What Friday and Sunday w^ere to the week, 
that Good Friday and Easter Sunday were to the year. 
And thus, in larger or smaller cycles, all time represented to 
the early Christians the mysteries of the Cross and the Risen 
Life hidden in humanity. And as the sunflower turns from 
morning till evening to the sun, so did the early Church turn 
forever to her Lord, transforming week and year into a sym- 
bolical representation of His spiritual life. 

Carefully distinguish this, the true historical view of the 
origin of the Lord's day, from a mere transference of a Jew- 
ish sabbath from one day to another. For St. Paul's teach- 
ing is distinct and clear, that the sabbath is annulled, and to 
urge the observance of the day as indispensable to salvation 
was, according to him, to Judaize : " to turn again to the 
weak and beggarly -elements, whereunto they desired to be 
in bondage." 

n. The modifications of this view. 

1. The first modification has reference to those who con- 
scientiously observed the day. He that observeth the day, 
observeth it to the Lord. Let him act, then, on that convic- 
tion : " Let him be fully persuaded in his own mind." There 
is therefore a religious observance of the sabbath-day possi- 

We are bound by the spirit of the fourth commandment, 
so far as we are in the same spiritual state as they to whom 
it was given. The spiritual intent of Christianity is to wor- 
ship God every day in the spirit. But had this law been 
given in all its purity to the Jews, instead of turning every 
week-day into a sabbath, they would have transformed every 
sabbath into a week-day : with no special day fixed for wor- 
ship, the)^ would have spent every day without worship. 
Their hearts were too dull for a devotion so spiritual and 
pure. Therefore a law was given, specializing a day, in or- 
der to lead them to the broader truth that every day is 
God's. 

Now, so far as we are in the Jewish state, the fourth com- 
mandment, even in its rigor and strictness, is wisely used by 
us ; nay, we might say, indispensable. For who is he who 
needs not the day ? He is the man so rich in love, so con- 
formed to the mind of Christ, so elevated into the sublime 
repose of heaven, that he needs no carnal ordinances at all, 
nor the assistance of one day in seven to kindle spiritual 



34 S The Sydenham Palace, and the 

feelings, seeing he is, as it were, all his life in heaven al« 
ready. 

And doubtless, such the Apostle Paul expected the 
Church of Christ to be. Anticipating the Second Advent 
at once ; not knowing the long centuries of slow progress 
that were to come, his heart would have sunk within hira 
could he have been told that at the end of eighteen centu- 
ries the Christian Church would be still observing days, 
and months, and times, and years, and still more, needing 
them. 

Needing them, I say. For the sabbath was made for 
man. God made it for men in a certain sj^iritual state, be- 
cause they needed it. The need therefore is deeply hidden 
in human nature. He who can dispense with it must be 
holy and spiritual indeed. And he who, still unholy and 
unspiritual, would yet dispense with it, is a man who would 
fain be wiser than his Maker. We, Christians as we are, 
still need the law : both in its restraints, and in its aids to 
our weakness. 

No man, therefore, who knows himself, but will gladly and 
joyfully use the institution. No man who knows the need 
of his brethren will wantonly desecrate it, or recklessly hurt 
even their scruples respecting its observance. And no such 
man can look with aught but grave and serious apprehen- 
sions on such an innovation upon English customs of life and 
thought, as the proposal to give public and official counte- 
nance to a scheme which will ^?^v^Ye millions, I do not say to 
an irreligious, but certainly an unreligious use of the day of 
rest. 

This then is the first modification of the broad view of a 
repealed sabbath. Repealed though it be, there is such a 
thing as a religious observance of it. And provided that 
those who are stricter than we in their views of its obliga- 
tion, observe it not from superstition, nor in abridgment 
of Christian liberty, nor from moroseness, we are bound in 
Christian charity to yield them all respect und honor. Let 
them act out their conscientious convictions. Let not him 
that observeth not despise hira that observeth. 

The second modification of the broad view is, that there is 
such a thing as a religious non-observance of the sabbath. I 
lay a stress on the word religious. For St. Paul does not say 
that every non-observance of the sabbath is religious, but 
that he who not observing it, observeth it not to the Lord, 
is, because acting on conscientious conviction, as acceptable 
as the others, who, in obedience to what they believe to be 
His will, observe it. 



Religious Non-Observa7ice of the Sabbath. 349 

He pays his non-observance to the Lord, who feeling that 
Christ has made him free, striving to live all his days in the 
spirit, and knowing that that which is displeasing to God is 
not work nor recreation, but selfishness and worldliness, re- 
fuses to be bound by a Jewish ordinance which forbade la- 
bor and recreation, only with a typical intent. 

But he who, not trying to serve God on any day, gives 
Sunday to toil or pleasure, certainly observes not the day : 
but his non-observance is not rendered to the Lord. He may 
be free from superstition : but it is not Christ who has made 
him free. Xor is he one of whom St. Paul would have said 
that his liberty on the sabbath is as acceptable as his broth- 
er's conscientious scrupulosity. 

Here, then, we are at issue with the popular defense of 
public recreations on the sabbath-day : not so much with re- 
spect to the practice, as with respect to the grounds on which 
the practice is approved. They claim liberty : but it is not 
Christian liberty. Like St. Paul, they demand a license for 
non-observance ; only, it is not " non-observance to the Lord." 
For distinguish well. The abolition of Judaism is not neces- 
sarily the establishment of Christianity : to do away with the 
sabbath-day in order to substitute a nobler, truer, more con- 
tinuous sabbath, even the sabbath of all time given up to 
God, is well; but to do away with the special rights of God 
to the sabbath, in order merely to substitute the rights of 
pleasure, or the rights of mammon, or even the license of 
profligacy and drunkenness, that, methinks, is not St. Paul's 
" Christian liberty !" 

The second point on which we join issue is the assump- 
tion that public places of recreation, which humanize, will 
therefore Christianize the people. It is taken for granted 
that architecture, sculpture, and the wonders of nature and 
art which such buildings will contain, have a direct or indi- 
rect tendency to lead to true devotion. 

Only in a very limited degree is there truth in this at all. 
Christianity will humanize : we are not so sure that human- 
izing will Christianize. Let us be clear upon this matter. 
Esthetics are not religion. It is one thing to civilize and 
polish : it is another thing to Christianize. The worship of 
the beautiful is not the w^orship of holiness ; nay, I know not 
whether the one may not have a tendency to disincline from 
the other. 

At least, such was the history of ancient Greece. Greece 
was the home of the arts, the sacred ground on which the 
worship of the beautiful was carried to its perfection. Let 
those who have read the history of her decline and fall, who 



350 The Syde7iham Palace, and the 

have perused the debasing works of her later years, tell us 
how music, painting, poetry, the arts, softened and debilita- 
ted and sensualized the nation's heart. Let them tell us 
how, when Greece's last and greatest man was warning in 
vain against the foe at her gates, and demanding a manlier 
and a more heroic disposition to sacrifice, that most polished 
and humanized people, sunk in trade and sunk in pleasure, 
were squandering enormous sums upon their buildings and 
their esthetics, their processions and their people's palaces, 
till the flood came, and the liberties of Greece were trampled 
down forever beneath the feet of the Macedonian conqueror. 

No ! the change of a nation's heart is not to be effected 
by the infusion of a taste for artistic grace. " Other founda- 
tion can no man lay than that is laid, which is Christ Jesus." 
Not artj but the cross of Christ. Simpler manners, purer 
lives : more self-denial ; more earnest sympathy with the 
classes that lie below us ; nothing short of that can lay the 
foundations of the Christianity which is to be hereafter, deep 
and broad. 

On the other hand, we dissent from the views of those 
who would arrest such a project by petitions to the legis- 
lature on these grounds : 

1. It is a return backward to Judaism and law. It may 
be quite true that, as we suspect, such non-observance of the 
day is not to the Lord ; but only a scheme of mere pecuni- 
ary speculatiouo Nevertheless there is such a thing as a re- 
ligious non-observance of the day : and we dare not "judge 
another man's servant : to his own master he standeth or 
falleth." We dare not assert the perpetual obligation of 
the sabbath, when an inspired apostle has declared it abro- 
gated. We dare not refuse a public concession of that kind 
of recreation to the poor man which the rich have long not 
hesitated to take in their sumptuous mansions and pleasure- 
grounds, unrebuked by the ministers of Christ, who seem 
touched to the quick only when the desecration of the sab- 
bath is loud and vulgar. We can not substitute a statute law 
for a repealed law of God. We may think, and we do, that 
there is much which may lead to dangerous consequences in 
this innovation : but we dare not treat it as a crime. 

2. The second ground on which we are opposed to the ul- 
tra-rigor of sabbath observance, especially when it becomes 
coercive, is the danger of injuring the conscience. It is 
wisely taught by St. Paul that he who does any thing with 
offense, ^. e., with a feeling that it is wrong, does wrong. 
To him it is wrong, even thougli it be not wrong abstractly. 
Therefore it is always dangerous to multiijly restrictions and 



Religious No7i-Observance of the Sabbath. 351 

requirements beyond -^hat is essential, because men feeling 
themselves hemmed in break the artificial barrier, but break- 
ing it with a sense of guilt, do thereby become hardened in 
conscience and prepared for transgression against command- 
ments which are divine and of eternal obligation. Hence it 
is that the criminal has so often in his confessions traced his 
deterioration in crime to the first step of breaking the 
sabbath-day, and no doubt with accurate truth. But what 
shall we infer from this ? Shall we infer, as is so often done 
upon the platform and in religious books, that it proves the 
everlasting obligation of the sabbath? Or shall we, with a 
far truer philosophy of the human soul, infer, in the language 
of St. Peter, that we have been laying on him " a yoke which 
neither w^e nor our fathers were able to bear ?" — in the lan- 
guage of St. Paul, that " the motions of sin w^ere by the law%" 
that the rigorous rule was itself the stimulating, moving 
cause of the sm : and that when the young man, w^orn out 
with his week's toil, first stole out into the fields to taste 
the fresh breath of a spring day, he did it with a vague, 
secret sense of transgression, and that having, as it were, 
drawn his sword in defiance against the established code of 
the religious world, he felt that from thenceforward there 
was for him no return, and so he became an outcast, his sword 
against every man, and every man's sword against him ? I 
believe this to be the true account of the matter ; and be- 
lieving it, I can not but believe that the false Jewish notions 
of the sabbath-day which are prevalent have been exceeding- 
ly pernicious to the morals of the country. 

Lastly, I remind you ot the danger of mistaking a " posi- 
tive " law" for a moral one. The danger is that proportion- 
ably to the vehemence with which the law positive is en- 
forced, the sacredness of moral law's is neglected. A positive 
law, in theological language, is a law laid down for special 
purposes, and corresponds with statute laws in things civil. 
Thus laws of quarantine and laws of excise depend for their 
force upon the wall of the legislature, and when repealed are 
binding no more. But a moral law" is one binding forever, 
which a statute law may declare, but can neither make nor 
unmake. 

Xow when men are rigorous in the enforcement and rev- 
erence paid to laws positive, the tendency is to a correspond- 
ing indifference to the laws of eternal right. The written 
supersedes in their hearts the moral. The mental history of 
the ancient Pharisees who observed the sabbath, and tithed 
mint, anise, and cummin, neglecting justice, mercy, and truth, 
is the history o\ a most dangerous but universal tendency of 



352 The Sydenham Palace, Etc, 

the human heart. And so, many a man whose heart swells 
with what he thinks pious horror when he sees the letter de- 
livered or the train run upon the sabbath-day, can pass 
through the streets at night, undepressed and unshocked by 
vhe evidences of the wide-spreading profligacy which has 
eaten deep into his country's heart. And many a man who 
would gaze upon the domes of a Crystal Palace, rising above 
the trees, Avith somewhat of the same feeling with which he 
would look on a temple dedicated to Juggernaut, and who 
would fancy that something of the spirit of an ancient proph* 
et was burning in his bosom, when his lips pronounced the 
woe ! woe ! of a coming doom, would sit calmly in a social 
circle of English life, and scarcely feel uneasy in listening to 
its uncharitableness and its slanders : would hear without 
one throb of indignation the common dastardly condemna- 
tion of the weak for sins w^hich are venial in the^strongr 
would survey the relations of the rich and poor in this coun- 
try, and remain calmly satisfied that there is nothing false in 
them, unbrotherly and wrong. No, my brethren ! let us 
think clearly and strongly on this matter. It may be that 
God has a controversy with this people. It may be, as they 
say, that our Father will chasten us by the sword of the 
foreigner. But if He does, and if judgments are in store for 
our country, they wnll fall — not because the correspondence 
of the land is carried on upon the sabbath-day : nor because 
Sunday trains are not arrested by the legislature ; nor be- 
cause a public permission is given to the working classes for 
a few hours' recreation on the day of rest — but because we 
are selfish men : and because we prefer pleasure to duty, and 
traffic to honor ; and because we love our party more than 
our Church, and our Church more than our Christianity ; 
and our Christianity more than truth, and ourselves more 
than all. These are the things that defile a nation : but the 
labor and the recreation of its poor, these are not the things 
that defile a nation 



The Early Development of Jesus, 353 



XIV. 
THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF JESUS. 

** And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom ; imh 
.'he grace of God was upon him. " — Luke ii. 40. 

The ecclesiastical year begins with Advent, then comes 
Christmas-day. The first day of the natural year begins 
with the infancy of the Son of Man. To-day the Gospel 
proceeds with the brief account of the early years of Jesus. 

The infinite significance of the life of Christ is not exhaust- 
ed by saying that He was a perfect man. The notion of the 
earlier Socinians that He was a pattern man {^iKoq av^pwroc), 
commissioned from Heaven with a message to teach men 
how to live, and supernaturally empowered to live in that 
perfect way Himself, is immeasurably short of truth. For 
perfection merely human does not attract ; rather it repels. 
It may be copied in form : it can not be imitated in spirit — ■ 
for men only imitate that from which enthusiasm and life 
are caught — for it does not inspire nor fire with love. 

Faultless men and pattern children — you may admire 
them, but you admire coldly. Praise them as you will, no 
one is better for their example. No one blames them, and 
no one loves them :• they kindle no enthusiasm ; they create 
no likeness of themselves : they never reproduce themselves 
in other lives — the true prerogative of all original life. 

If Christ had been only a faultless being. He would never 
have set up in the world a new type of character which at 
the end of two thousand years is fresh and life-giving and 
inspiring still. He never would have regenerated the world. 
He never would have " drawn all men unto Him," by bei'^.g 
lifted uj) a self-sacrifice, making self-devotion beautiful. In 
Christ the divine and human blended : immutability joined 
itself to mutability. There was in Him the divine which re- 
mained fixed ; the human which was constantly developing. 
One uniform idea and purpose characterized His whole life, 
with a divine immutable unity throughout, but it was sub- 
ject to the laws of human growth. For the soul of Christ 
was not cast down upon this world a perfect thing at once. 
Spotless ? — yes. Faultless? — yes. Tempted, yet in all points 
without sin ? — yes. But perfection is more than faultlessness. 
All Scripture coincides in telling us that the ripe perfection 



354 ^^^ Early Development of Jesus, 

of His manhood was reached step by step. There was a 
power and a life within Him which were to be developed, 
which could only be developed, like all human strength and 
goodness, by toil of brain and heart. Life up-hill all the 
way : and every foot-print by which He climbed left behind 
for us, petrified on the hard rock, and indurated into history 
forever, to show us when, and where, and how He toiled and 
won. 

Take a few passages to prove that His perfection was 
gained by degrees. " It became Him for whom are all 
things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons 
to glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect 
through sufiering." Again, " Behold, I cas-fc out devils, and 
do cures to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I shall be 
perfected.'''' " Though He were a Son, yet learned He obedi- 
ence." And in the context, " Jesus increased. . . . ." 

Now see the result of this aspect of His perfectibility. In 
that changeless element of His being which beneath all the 
varying phases of growth remained divinely faultless, we see 
that which we can adore. In the ever-changing, ever-grow- 
ing, subject therefore to feebleness and endearing mutabili- 
ty, we see that which brings Him near to us : makes Him 
lovable, at the same time that it interprets us to ourselves. 

Our subject is the early development of Jesus. In this 
text we read of a threefold growth. 

I. In strength. 
II. In wisdom. 
IH. Ip grace. * 

First, it speaks to us simply of his early development, 
"The child grew." 

In the case of all rare excellence that is merely human, it 
is the first object of the biographer of a marvellous man to 
seek for surprising stories of his early life. The appetite for 
the marvellous in this matter is almost instinctive and inva- 
riable. Almost all men love to discover the early wonders 
which were prophetic of after-greatness. Apparently the 
reason is that we are unwilling to believe that wondrous ex- 
cellence was attained by slow, patient labor. We get an ex- 
cuse for our own slowness and stunted growth, by settling it 
once for all, that the original differences between such men 
and us were immeasurable. Therefore it is, I conceive, that 
we seek so eagerly for anecdotes of early precocity. 

In this spirit the fathers of the primitive Church collected 
legends of the early life of Christ, stories of superhuman in- 
fancy : what the infant and the child said and did. Many 



The Early Development of yesus, 355 

of these legends are absurd : all, as resting on no authority, 
are rejected. 

Very different from this is the spirit of the Bible narra- 
tive. It records no marvellous stories of infantine sagacity 
or miraculous power, to feed a prurient curiosity. Both in 
what it tells and in what it does not tell, one thing is plain, 
that the human life of the Son of God was natural. There 
was first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn. In what 
it does not say : because, had there been any thing preter- 
natural to record, no doubt it would have been recorded. 
In what it does say : because that little is all unaffectedly 
simple. One anecdote, and two verses of general descrip- 
tion, that is all which is told us of the Redeemer's childhood. 

The Child, it is written, grew. Two pregnant facts. He 
was a child, and a child that grew in heart, in intellect, in 
size, in grace, in favor with God. Not a man in child's 
years. No hotbed precocity marked the holiest of infancies. 
The Son of Man grew up in the quiet valley of existence — 
in shadow^not in sunshine, not /breed No unnatural, stimu- 
lating culture had developed the mind or feelings : no pub- 
lic flattery : no sunning of His infantine perfections in the 
glare of the world's show, had brought the temptation of 
the wilderness, with which His manhood grappled, too early 
on His soul. We know that He was childlike as other chil- 
dren : for in after years His brethren thought His fame 
strange, and His townsmen rejected Him. They could not 
believe that one who had gone in and out, ate and drank and 
worked among them, was He whose name is Wonderful. 
The proverb, true of others, was true of Him : "A prophet is 
not without honor, but in his own country, and among his 
own kin, and in his own house." You know Him in 2i picture 
at once, by the halo round His brow. There was no glory 
in His real life to mark Him. He was in the world, and the 
world knew Him not. Gradually and gently He woke to 
consciousness of life and its manifold meaning ; found Him- 
self in possession of a self; by degrees opened His eyes upon 
this outer world, and drank in its beauty. Early He felt 
the lily of the field discourse to Him of the Invisible Loveli- 
ness, and the ravens tell of God His Father. Gradually and 
not at once. He embraced the sphere of human duties, and 
He woke to His earthly relationships one by one — the son — 
the brother — the citizen — the master. 

It is a very deep and beautiful and precious truth that the 
Eternal Son had a human and progressive childhood. Hap- 
py the child who is suffered to be and content to be what 
Grod meant it to be — a child while childhood lasts. Happy 



35^ The Early Development of Jesus, 

the parent who does not force artificial manners, precocious 
feeling, premature religion. Our age is one of stimulus and 
high pressure. We live, as it were, our lives out fast. Ef- 
fect is every thing. We require results produced at once : 
something to show and something that may tell. The folio 
of patient years is replaced by the pamphlet that stirs men's 
curiosity to-day, and to-morrow is forgotten. " Plain living 
and high thinking are no more." The town, with its fever 
and its excitements, and its collision of mind with mind, has 
spread over the country : and there is no country, scarcely 
home. To men who traverse England in a few hours and 
spend only a portion of the year in one place, home is becom- 
ing a vocable of past ages. 

The result is, that heart and brain, which were gi^en to 
last for seventy years, wear out before their time. TV e have 
our exhausted men of twenty-five, and our old men of forty. 
Heart and brain give wa}^: the heart hardens and the brain 
grows soft. 

Brethren ! the Son of God lived till thirty in an obscure 
village of Judea, unknown : then came forth a matured and 
perfect man — with mind, and heart, and frame in perfect 
balance of humanity. It is a Divine lesson ! I would I could 
say as strongly as I feel deeply. Our stimulating artificial 
culture destroys depth. Our competition, our nights turned 
into days by pleasure, leave no time for earnestness. We 
are superficial men. Character in the world wants root. 
England has gained much : she has lost also much. The 
world wants what has passed away, and which until we se- 
cure, we shall remain the clever shallow men we are : a child- 
hood and a youth spent in the shade — a home. 

Now this growth of Jesus took place in three particulars. 

I. In spiritual strength. " The child waxed strong in spirit." 
Spiritual strength consists of two things — power of will, and 
power of self-restraint. It requires two things, therefore, for its 
existence — strong feelings and strong command over them. 

Now it is here we make a great mistake : we mistake 
strong feelings for strong character. A man who bears all 
before him — before whose frown domestics tremble, and 
whose bursts of fury make the children of the house quake — 
because he has his will obeyed and his own way in all things 
we call him a strong man. The truth is, that is the weak 
man ; it is his passions that are strong : he, mastered by 
them, is weak. You must measure the strength of a man by 
the power of the feelings which he subdues, not by the power 
of those which subdue him. 



The Early Development of Jesus. 357 

And hence composure is very often the highest result of 
strength. Did we never see a man receive a flagrant insult, 
and only grow a little pale, and then reply quietly ? That 
was a man spiritually strong. Or did we never see a man in 
anguish stand as if carved out of solid rock, mastering him- 
self? or one bearing a hopeless daily trial remain silent, and 
never tell the woi-ld what it was that cankered his home- 
peace ? That is strength. He who with strong passions re- 
mains chaste : he who, keenly sensitive, with manly power of 
indignation in him, can be provoked and yet refrain himself, 
and forgive — these are strong men, spiritual heroes. 

The Child waxed strong. Spiritual strength is reached by 
successive steps ; fresh strength is got by every mastery of 
self. It is the belief of the savage that the spirit of every 
enemy he slays enters into him and becomes added to his 
own, accumulating a warrior's strength for the day of battle: 
therefore he slays all he can. It is true in the spiritual war- 
fare. Every sin you slay — the spirit of that sin passes into 
you transformed into strength : every passion, not merely 
kept in abeyance by asceticism, but subdued by a higher im- 
pulse, is so much character strengthened. The strength of 
the passion not expended is yours still. Understand then, 
you are not a man of spiritual power because your impulses 
are irresistible. They sweep over your soul like a tornado — - 
lay all flat before them ; whereupon you feel a secret pride 
of strength. Last week men saw a vessel on this coast borne 
headlong on the breakers, and dashing itself with terrific force 
against the shore. It embedded itself, a miserable wreck, 
deep in sand and shingle. Was that brig in her convulsive 
throes strong ? or was it powerless and helpless ? 

Xo, my brethren : God's spirit in the soul — an inward powei 
of doing the thing we will and ought — that is strength, noth- 
ing else. All other force in us is only our weakness, the vio- 
lence of driving passion. "I can do all things through Christ 
who strengtheneth me :" this is Christian strength. " I can 
not do the things I would :" that is the weakness of an unre- 
deemed slave. 

I instance one single evidence of strength in the early years 
of Jesus : I find it in that calm, long waiting of thirty 5-ears 
before He began his work. And yet all the evils he was to re- 
dress were there, provoking indignation, crying for interfer- 
ence — the hollo wness of social life — the misinterpretations of 
Scripture — the forms of worship and phraseology which had 
hidden moral truth — the injustice — the priestcraft — the cow- 
ardice — the hypocrisies : He had long seen them all. 

All those years His soul burned within Him with a Divine 



358 The Early Development of yesus, 

zeal and heavenly indignation. A mere man — a weak, emo 
tional man of spasmodic feeling — a hot enthusiast, would 
have spoken out at once, and at once been crushed. The 
Everlasting Word incarnate bided his own time : " Mine hour 
is not yet come " — matured His energies, condensed them by 
repression — and then went forth to speak and do and suffer — • 
His hour was come. This is strength : the^power of a divine 
silence : the strong will to keep force till it is wanted : the 
power to wait God's time. "He that believeth," said the 
wise prophet, " shall not make haste." 

n. Growth in wisdom — " Filled with wisdom." 

Let us distinguish wisdom from two things. From informa- 
tion, first. It is one thing to be well-informed, it is another 
thing to be wise. Many books read, innumerable facts hived 
up in a capacious memory, this does not constitute wisdom. 
Books give it not : sometimes the bitterest experience gives 
it not. Many a heart-break may have come as the result of 
life-errors and life-mistakes ; and yet men may be no wiser 
than before. Before the same temptations they fall again in 
the self-same way they fell before. Where they erred in youth 
they err still in age. A mournful truth! "Ever learning," 
said St. Paul, " and never able to come to a knowledge of the 
truth." 

Distinguish wisdom, again, from talent. Brilliancy of pow- 
ers is not the wisdom for which Solomon prayed. Wisdom 
is of the heart rather than the intellect : the harvest of moral 
thoughtfulness, patiently reaped in through years. Two 
things are required — earnestness and love. First that rare 
thing earnestness — the earnestness which looks on life prac- 
tically. Some of the wisest of the race have been men who 
have scarcely stirred beyond home, read little, felt and 
thought much. " Give me," said Solomon, " a wise and un- 
derstanding heart." A heart which ponders upon life, trying 
to understand its mystery, not in order to talk about it like 
an orator, nor in order to theorize about it like a philosopher; 
but in order to know how to live and how to die. 

And, besides this, love is required for wisdom — the love 
which opens the heart and makes it generous, and reveals se* 
crets deeper than prudence or political economy teaches; 
for example, "It is more blessed to give than to receive." 
Prudence did not calculate that^ love revealed it. No man 
can be wise without love. Prudent : cunning : yes ; but not 
wise. Whoever has closed his heart to love has got wisdom 
at one entrance quite shut out. A large, genial, loving heart 
— with that we have known a ploughman wise ; without it 



The Early Development of Jesus, 359 

we know a hundred men of statesmanlike sagacity fools- 
profound, but not wise. There was a man who pulled down 
his barns and built greater, a most sagacious man, getting on 
in life, acquiring, amassing, and all for self The men of that 
generation called him, no doubt, wise — God said, " Thou fool.'' 
Speaking humanly, the steps by which the wisdom of Jesu3 
was acquired were two. 

1. The habit of inquiry. 

2. The collision of mind with other minds. 

Both these we find in this anecdote : His parents founft 
Him with the doctors in the temple, both hearing and asking 
them questions. For the mind of man left to itself is unpro- 
ductive: alone in the wild woods he becomes a savage. 
Taken away from school early, and sent to the plough, the 
country boy loses by degrees that which distinguishes him 
from the cattle that he drives, and over his very features and 
looks the low animal expressions creep. Mind is necessary 
for mind. The mediatorial system extends through all God's 
dealings with us. The higher man is the mediator between 
God and the lower man : only through man can man receive 
development. For these reasons, we call this event a^t Jeru- 
salem a crisis or turning-point in the history of Him who was 
truly man. 

He had come from Nazareth's quiet valley and green slopes 
on the hillsides, where hill and valley, and cloud and wind, 
and day and night, had nourished His child's heart — from 
communion with minds proverbially low, for the adage was, 
" Can any good thing come out of Nazareth ?" — to the cap- 
ital of His country, to converse with the highest and most 
cultivated intellects. He had many a question to ask, and 
many a difficulty to solve. As for instance, such as this: 
How could the religion accredited in Jerusalem — a religion 
of long prayers and church services, and phylacteries, and 
rigorous sabbaths — be reconciled with the stern, manly right- 
eousness of which He had read in the old prophets : a right- 
eousness not of litany-makers, but of men with swords in their 
hands and zeal in their hearts, setting up God's kingdom upon 
earth? a kingdom of truth, and justice, and realities — were 
they bringing in that kingdom? — And if not, who should? 
Such questions had to be felt, and asked, and pondered on. 
Thenceforth we say therefore, in all reverence, dated the in- 
tellcKitual life of Jesus. From that time " Jesus increased 
in loisdomy 

Not that they, the doctors of the temple, contributed much. 
Those ecclesiastical pedants had not much to tell Him that 
was worth the telling. They were thinking about theology. 



360 The Early Development of Jesus. 

He about religion. They about rubrics and church services, 
He about God His Father, and His will. And yet He gained 
more from them than they from Him. Have we never ob 
served that the deepest revelations of ourselves are often 
made to us by trilling remarks met with here and there in 
conversation and books, sparks which set a whole train of 
thoughts on fire ? Nay, that a false view giv^n by an inferior 
mind has led us to a true one, and that conversations from 
which we had expected much light, turning out unsatisfac- 
torily, have thrown us upon ourselves and God, and so be- 
come almost the birth-times of the soul? The truth is, it is 
not the amount which is poured in that gives wisdom : but 
the amount of creative mind and heart working on and stirred 
by what is so poured in. That conversation w4th miserable 
priests and formalists called into actiAdty the One Creative 
Mind which was to fertilize the whole spiritual life of man to 
the end of time : and Jesus grew in wisdom by a conversation 
with pedants of the law. 

What Jerusalem was to Him a town life is to us. Knowl- 
edge develops itself in the heated atmosphere of town life. 
Where men meet, and thought clashes with thought — where 
workmen sit round a board at work, iutellectual irritability 
must be stirred more than where men live and work alone. 
The march of mind, as they call it, must go on. Whatever 
evils there may be in our excited, feverish, modern life, it is 
quite certain that we know through it mure than our fore 
fathers knew. Tlie workman knows more of foreign politics 
than most statesmen knew two centuries ago. The child is 
versed in theological questions which only occupied master- 
minds once. But the question is, whether, like the Divine 
Child in the Temple, we are turning knowledge into wisdom, 
and whether, understanding more of the mysteries of life, we 
are feeling more of its sacred law ; and whether, having left 
behind the priests, and the scribes, and the doctors, and the 
fathers, we are about our Father's business, and becoming 
wise to God. 

HI. Growth in grace — " the grace of God was upon Him." 
And this in three points : 

1. The exchange of an earthly for a heavenly home. 

2. Of an earthly for a heavenly parent. 

3. The reconciliation of domestic duties. 

First step : Exchange of an earthly for a heavenly home. 
Jesus was in the temple for the first time. That which was 
dull routine to others tlirough dead habit, was full of vivid 
impression, fresh life, and God to Him. " My P^ather's busi- 



The Early Development of Jesus, 361 

ness" — "My Father's house." How different the meaning 
of these expressions now from what it had 'been before ! Be« 
fore all was limited to the cottage of the carpenter : now it 
extended to the temple. He had felt the sanctities of a new 
home. In after-life the phrase which He had learned by 
earthly experience obtained a divine significance. "In my; 
Father's house are many mansions." 

Our first life is spontaneous and instinctive. Our second 
life is reflective. There is a moment when the life sponta- 
neous passes into the life reflective. We live at first by 
instinct ; then we look in, feel ourselves, ask what we are 
and whence we came, and whither we are bound. In an 
awful new world of mystery, and destinies, and duties, we 
feel God, and know that our true home is our Father's house 
which has many mansions. 

Those are fearful, solitary moments; in which the heart 
knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth 
not with its joys. Father — mother — can not share these; 
and to share is to intrude. The soul first meets God alone. 
So w^ith Jacob when he saw the dream-ladder: so with 
Samuel when the voice called him: so with Christ. So 
with every son of man, God visits the soul in secrecy, in 
silence, and in solitariness. And the danger and duty of a 
teacher is twofold. 1st. To avoid hastening that feeling, 
hurrying that crisis-moment which some call conversion. 
2d. To avoid crushing it. I have said that first religion is 
a kind of instinct ; and if a child does not exhibit strong 
religious sensibilities, if he seem " heedless, untouched by awe 
or serious thought," still it is wiser not to interfere. He 
may be still at home with God : he may be worshipping at 
home ; as has been said with not less truth than beauty, he 
may be 

*'L}ang in Abraham's bosom all the year, 
And worship at the temple's inner shrine," 

God being with him when he knew it not. Very mysterious, 
and beautiful, and wonderful, is God's communing with the 
unconscious soul before reflection comes. The second cau- 
tion is not to quench the feeling. Joseph and the Virgin 
chid the Child for His absence : " Why hast thou dealt so 
with us?" They could not understand His altered ways: 
His neglect of apparent duties : His indifference to usual 
pursuits. They mourned over the change. And this reminds 
us of the way in which affection's voice itself ministers to 
ruin. When God comes to the heart, and His presence is 
shown by thoughtfulness, and seriousness, and distaste to 
common business, and loneliness, and solitary musings, and 



362 The Early Development of Jesus, 

a certain tone of melancholy, straightway we set ourselves 
to expostulate, to rebuke, to cheer, to prescribe amusement 
and gayeties, as the cure for seriousness which seems out of 
place. Some of us have seen that tri^d ; and more fearful 
still, seen it succeed. And we have seen the spirit of fri- 
volity and thoughtlessness, which had been banished for a 
time, come back again with seven spirits of evil more mighty 
than himself, and the last state of that person w^orse than 
the first. And we have watched the still small voice of 
God in the soul silenced. And we have seen the spirit of 
the world get its victim back again ; and incipient goodness 
dried up like morning dew upon the heart. And they that 
loved him did it — his parents — his teachers. They quenched 
the smoking flax, and turned out the lamp of God lighted 
in the soul ! 

The last step was reconciliation to domestic duties. He 
went down to Nazareth, and was subject unto them. The 
first step in spirituality is to get a distaste for common du- 
ties. There is a time when creeds, ceremonies, services, are 
distasteful ; when the conventional arrangements of society 
are intolerable burdens ; and when, aspiring with a sense 
of vague longing after a goodness which shall be immeasur- 
able, a duty which shall transcend mere law, a something 
which we can not put in words — all restraints of rule and 
habit gall the spirit. But the last and highest step in spir- 
ituality is made in feeling these common duties again to be 
divine and holy. This is the true liberty of Christ, when a 
free man binds himself in love to duty. Not in shrinking 
from our distasteful occupations, but in fulfilling them, do 
we realize our high origin. And this is the blessed, second 
childhood of Christian life. All the several stages towards 
it seem to be shadowed forth with accurate truthfulness in 
the narrative of the Messiah's infancy. First the quiet, un- 
pretending, unconscious obedience and innocence of home. 
Then the crisis of inquiry : new strange thoughts, entrance 
upon a new world, hopeless seeking of truth from those who 
can not teach it, hearing many teachers and questioning all : 
thence bewilderment and bitterness, loss of relish for formei* 
duties : and small consolation to a man in knowing that he 
is fartlier ofl" from heaven than when he was a boy. And 
then, lastly, the true reconciliation and atonement of our 
Bouls to God — a second springtide of life — a second faith 
deeper than that of childhood — not instinctive but conscious 
trust — childlike love come back again — childlike wonder — 
childlike implicitness of obedience — only deeper than child- 
liood ever knew; when life has got a new meaning, when 



Christ's Estimate of Sin. 363 

"old things are passed away, and all things are become 
new;" when earth has become irradiate with the feeling of 
our Father's business and our Father's home. 



X7. 
CHRIST'S ESTBIATE OF SEN". 

" The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost."—. 
Luke xix. 10. 

These words occur in the history which tells of the re- 
covery of Zaccheus from a life of worldliness to the life of 
God, Zaccheus was a publican; and the publicans were 
outcasts among the Jews, because, having accepted the 
office under the Roman government of collecting the taxes 
imposed by Rome upon their brethren, they were regarded 
as traitors to the cause of Israel. Reckoned a degraded 
class, they became degraded. It is hard for any man to live 
above the moral standard acknowledged by his own class; 
and the moral standard of the publican Avas as low as possible. 
The first step downward is to sink in the estimation of others 
— the next and fatal step is to sink in a man's own estima- 
tion. The value ot character is that it pledges men to be 
what they are taken for. It is a fearful thing to have no 
character to support — nothing to fall back upon — nothing 
to keep a man up to himself. Now the publicans had no 
character. 

Into the house of one of these outcasts the Son of Man 
had entered. It was quite certain that such an act would be 
commented upon severely by people who called themselves 
religious : it would seem to them scandalous, an outrage 
upon decency, a defiance to every rule of respectability and 
decorum. Xo pious Israelite would be seen holding equal 
intercourse with a publican. In anticipation of such remarks, 
before there was time perhaps to make them, Jesus spoke 
these words : " The Son of Man is come to seek and to save 
that which was lost." They exhibit the peculiar aspect in 
which the Redeemer contemplated sin. 

There are tAvo ways of looking at sin. One is the severe 
view : it makes no alloAvance for frailty — it will not hear of 
temptation, nor distinguish between circumstances. Men 
who judge in this way shut their eyes to all but two objects 
—a plain law. and a transgression of that law. There is no 



364 Christ's Estimate of Sin, 

more to be said: let the law take its course. Now if this 
be the right view of sin, there is abundance of room left for 
admiring what is good, and honorable, and upright : there is 
positively no room provided for restoration. Happy if you 
have done well ; but if ill, then nothing is before you but 
judgment and fiery indignation. 

The other view is one of laxity and false liberalism. When 
such men speak, prepare yourself to hear liberal judgments 
and lenient ones : a great deal about human weakness, error 
in judgment, mistakes, an unfortunate constitution, on which 
the chief blame of sin is to rest — a good heart. All well if 
we wanted, in this mysterious struggle of a life, only conso- 
lation. But we want far beyond comfort — goodness ; and to 
be merely made easy when we have done wrong will not help 
us to that! 

Distinct from both of these was Christ's view of guilt. 
His standard of right was high — higher than ever man had 
placed it before. S"ot moral excellence, but heavenly, He de- 
manded. " Except your righteousness shall exceed the right- 
eousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case en- 
ter into the kingdom of heaven." Read the Sermon on the 
Mount. It tells of a purity as of snow resting on an Alpine 
pinnacle, white in the blue holiness of heaven ; and yet also, 
He the All-pure had tenderness for what was not pure. He 
w^ho stood in divine uprightness that never faltered, felt com- 
passion for the ruined, and infinite gentleness for human fall. 
Broken, disappointed, doubting hearts, in dismay and bewil- 
derment, never looked in vain to Him. Very strange, if we 
stop to think of it, instead of repeating it as a matter of 
course. For generally human goodness repels from it evil 
men : they shun the society and presence of men reputed 
good, as owls fly from light. But here was purity attracting 
evil ; that was the wonder. Harlots and wretches steeped in 
infamy gathered round Him. No wonder the purblind Phar- 
isees thought there must be something in Him like such sin- 
ners which drew them so. Like draws to like. If He chose 
their society before that of the Pharisee, was it not because 
of some congeniality in evil ? But they did crowd His steps, 
and that because they saw a hope opened out in a hopeless 
world for fallen spirits and broken hearts, ay, and seared 
hearts. The Son of Man was forever standing among the 
lost, and His ever predominant feelings were sadness for the 
evil in human nature, hope for the divine good in it, and the 
divine image never Avorn out w^holly. 

I perceive in this description three peculiarities, distin 
guishing Christ from ordinary men. 



Christ's Estimate of Sin 365 

L A peculiarity in the constitution of the Redeemer's 
moral nature. 

n. A peculiarity in the objects of His solicitude. 
nL A peculiarity in His way of treating guilt. 

I. In His moral constitution. Manifested in that peculiar 
title which he assumed — The Son of Man. Let us see what 
that implies. 

1. It implies fairly His divine origin : for it is an emphatic 
expression, and, as we may so say, an unnatural one. Im- 
agine an apostle, St. Paul or St. John, insisting upon it per- 
petually that he himself was human. It would almost pro- 
voke a smile to hear either of them averring and affirming, 
I am a son of man : it would be unnatural, the affectation of 
condescension would be intolerable. Therefore, when we 
hear these words from Christ, we are compelled to think of 
them as contrasted with a higher nature. None could with- 
out presumption remind men that He was their brother and 
a Son of Man, except One who was also something higher, 
even the Son of God. 

2. It implies the catholicity of His brotherhood. 

Nothing in the judgment of historians stands out so sharp- 
ly distinct as race — national character : nothing is more in- 
effaceable. The Hebrew was marked from all mankhid. The 
Roman was perfectly distinct from the Grecian character; 
as markedly different as the rough English truthfulness is 
from Celtic brilliancy of talent. Now these peculiar nation- 
alities are seldom combined. You rarely find the stern, old 
Jewish sense of holiness going together with the Athenian 
sensitiveness of what is beautiful. Not often do you find 
together severe truth and refined tenderness. Brilliancy 
seems opposed to perseverance. Exquisiteness of taste com- 
monly goes along with a certain amount of untruthfulness. 
By humanity, as a whole, we mean the aggregate of all these 
separate excellences. Only in two places are they all found 
together — in the universal human race ; and in Jesus Christ. 
He having, as it Avere, a whole humanity in Himself, com- 
bines them all. 

Now this is the universality of the nature of Jesus Christ. 
There was in Him no national peculiarity or individual idio- 
syncrasy. He was not the Son of the Jew, nor the Son of 
the carpenter; nor the offspring of the modes of living and 
thinking of that particular century. He was the Son of Man. 
Once in the world's history was born a Man. Once in the 
roll of ages, out of innumerable failures, from the stock of 
human nature, one bud developed itself into a faultless flow 



366 Christ's Estimate of Sin, 

er. One perfect specimen of humanity has God exhibited on 
earth. 

The best and most catholic of Englishmen has his preju- 
dices. All the world over, our greatest writer would be rec- 
ognized as having the English cast of thought. The pattern 
Jew would seem Jewish everywhere but in Judea. Take 
Abraham, St. John, St. Paul, place them where you will, in 
China or in Peru, they are Hebrews : they could not com- 
mand all sympathies : their life could not be imitable except 
in part. They are foreigners in every land, and out of place 
in every country but their own. But Christ is the King of 
men, and " draws all men," because all character is in Him, 
separate from nationalities and limitations. As if the life- 
blood of every nation were in His veins, and that which is 
best and truest in every man, and that which is tenderest, 
and gentlest, and purest in every woman, were in His char- 
acter. He is emphatically the Son oi Man. 

Out of this arose two powers of His sacred humanity — the 
universality of His sympathies, and their intense particular 
personality. 

The universality of His sympathies : for, compare Him 
with any one of the sacred characters of Scripture. You 
know how intensely national they were in their sympathies, 
priests, prophets, and apostles: for example, the apostles 
"marvelled that He spake with a woman of Samaria:" — just 
before His resurrection, their largest charity had not reached 
beyond this, "Lord, wilt thou at this time restore the king- 
dom unto Israel f'' Or, to come down to modern times, 
when His spirit has been moulding men's ways of thought 
for many ages : — now, when we talk of our philanthropy and 
catholic liberality, here in Christian England, we have scarce- 
ly any fellow-feeling, true and genuine, with other nations, 
other churches, other parties, than our own : we care nothing 
for Italian or Hungarian struggles ; we think of Romanists as 
the Jew thought of Gentiles ; we speak of German Protest- 
ants in the same proud, wicked, self-sufficient way in which 
the Jew spoke of Samaritans. 

Unless we bring such matters home, and away from vague 
generalities, and consider what we and all men are, or rather 
are not, we can not comprehend with due wonder the mighty 
sympathies of the heart of Christ. None of the miserable 
antipathies that fence us from all the world, bounded the out- 
goings of that love, broad and deep and wide as the heart 
of God. Wherever the mysterious pulse of human life waa 
beating, wherever aught human was in struggle, there to Him 
was a thing not common or unclean, but cleansed by God and 



Christ's Estimate of Sin. 367 

eacred. Compare the daily, almost indispensable language 
of our life with His spirit. " Common people ?" — Point us 
out the passage where He called any people that God His Fa- 
ther made, common ? " Lower orders ?" — Tell us when and 
where He, whose home was the workshop of the carpenter, 
authorized j^ou or me to know any man after the flesh as low 
or high ? To Him who called Himself the Son of Man, the 
link was manhood. And that he could discern even when it 
was marred. Even in outcasts His eye could recognize the 
sanctities of a nature human still. Even in the harlot " one 
of Eve's family :"— a " son of Abraham " even in Zaccheus. 

Once more, out of that universal, catholic nature rose 
another power — the power of intense, particular, personal af- 
fections. He was the Brother and Saviour of the human 
race ; but this because He was the Brother and Saviour of 
every separate man in it. 

Now it is very easy to feel great afiection for a country as 
a whole ; to have, for instance, great sympathies for Poland, 
or Ireland, or America, and yet not care a whit for any single 
man in Poland, and to have strong antipathies to every sin- 
gle individual American. Easy to be a warm lover of Eng- 
land, and yet not love one living Englishman. Easy to set a 
great value on a flock of sheep, and yet have no particular care 
for any one sheep or lamb. If it were killed, another of the 
same species might replace it. Easy to have fine, large, liberal 
views about the working classes, or the emancipation of the 
negroes, and yet never have done a loving act to one. Easy 
to be a great philanthropist, and yet have no strong friend- 
ships, no deep personal attachments. 

For the idea of an universal manlike sympathy was not new 
when Christ was born. The reality icas new. But before 
this, in the Roman theatre, deafening applause was called 
forth by this sentence, "I am a man — nothing that can aflect 
man is indifierent to me." A fine sentiment — that was all. 
Every pretense of realizing that sentiment, except one, has been 
a failure. One and but One has succeeded in loving man : and 
that by loving men. No sublime high-sounding language in 
His lips about " educating the masses," or " elevating the 
people." The charlatanry of our modern sentiment had not 
appeared then : it is but the parody of His love. 

What was His mode of sympathy with men ? He did not 
sit down to philosophize about the progress of the species, or 
dream about a millennium. He gathered round Him twelve 
men. He formed one friendship, special, concentrated, deep. 
He did not give himself out as the leader of the publican's 
cause^ or the champion of the rights of the dangerous 



368 Chris fs Estimate of Si7i. 

classes ; but He associated with Himself Matthew, a publican 
called from the detested receipt 01 custom. He went into 
the house of Zaccheus, and treated him like a fellow-creature 
■ — a brother, and a son of Abraham. His catholicity or phi- 
lanthropy was not an abstraction, but an aggregate of person- 
al attachments. 

n. Peculiarity in the objects of Christ's solicitude. 

He had come to seek and to save the " losV The world 
is lost, and Christ came to save the world. But by the lost 
in this place He does not mean the world ; He means a spe 
cial class, lost in a more than common sense, as sheep are lost 
which have strayed from the flock, and wandered far beyond 
all their fellows scattered in the wilderness. 

Some men are lost by the force of their own passions, as 
Balaam was by love of gold : as Saul was by self-will, ending 
in jealousy, and pride darkened into maduess ; as Haman was 
by envy indulged and brooded on: as the harlots were, 
through feelings pure and high at first, inverted and pervert- 
ed : as Judas was by secret dishonesty, undetected in its first 
beginnings, the worst misfortune that can befall a tendency 
to a false life. And others are lost by the entanglement of 
outward circumstances, which make escape, humanly speak- 
ing, impossible. Such were the publicans : men forced^ like 
executioners, into degradation. An honest publican, or a 
holy executioner, would be miracles to marvel at. And some 
are lost by the laws of society, which while defending society 
have no mercy for its outcasts, and forbid their return, fallen 
once, forever. 

Society has power to bind on earth ; and what it binds is 
bound upon the soul indeed. For a man or woman who has 
lost self-respect is lost indeed. 

And oh ! the untold world of agony contained in that ex- 
pression — " a lost soul !" agony exactly in proportion to the 
nobleness of original powers. For it is a strange and mourn- 
ful truth, that the qualities which enable men to shine are 
exactly those which minister to the worst ruin. God's high- 
est gifts — talent, beauty, feeling, imagination, power : they 
carry with them the possibility of the highest heaven and the 
lowest hell. Be sure that it is by that which is highest in 
you that you may be lost. It is the awful warning, and not 
the excuse of evil, that the light which leads astray is light 
from heaven. The shallow fishing-boat glides safely over the 
reefs where the noble bark strands : it is the very might and 
majesty of her career that bury the sharp rock deeper in hei 
bosom. There arc thousands who arc not lost (Uke tho ro 



Chris fs Estimate of Sin, 369 

epectable Pharisees), because they had no impetuous impulses, 
no passion, no strong enthusiasm, by the perversion of which 
they could be lost. 

Now this will explain to us what there was in these lost 
ones which left a hope for their salvation, and which Jesus 
saw in them to seek and save. Outwardly men saw a crust 
of black scowling impenitence. Reprobates they called them. 
Below that outward crust ran a hot lava-stream of anguish: 
What was that ? The coward fear of hell ? Nay, hardened 
men defy hell. The anguish of the lost ones of this world is 
not fear of punishment. It was, and is, the misery of having 
quenched a light brighter than the sun : the intolerable sense 
of being sunk: the remorse of knowing that they were not 
what they might have been. And He saw that : He knew 
that it was the germ of life which God's spirit could develop 
into salvation. 

It was His work and His desire to save such, and in this 
world a new and strange solicitude it was, for the world had 
seen before nothing like it. 

Not half a century ago a great man was seen stooping and 
working in a charnel-house of bones. Uncouth, nameless 
fragments lay around him, which the workmen had dug up 
and thrown aside as rubbish. They belonged to some far^ 
back age, and no man knew what they were or whence. Few 
men cared. The world w^as merry at the sight of a philoso- 
pher groping among mouldy bones. But when that creative 
mind, reverently discerning the fontal types of living being 
in diverse shapes, brought together those strange fragments, 
bone to bone, and rib to claw, and tooth to its own corre- 
sponding vertebrae, recombining the wondrous forms of past 
ages, and presenting each to the astonished world as it 
moved and lived a hundred thousand ages back, then men 
began to perceive that a new science had begun on earth. 

And such was the work of Christ. They saw Him at work 
among the fragments and mouldering wreck of our humanity, 
and sneered. But He took the dry bones such as Ezekiel 
saw in vision, which no man thought could live, and He 
breathed into them the breath of life. He took the scattered 
fragments of our ruined nature, interpreted their meanings 
showed the original intent of those powers, which were now 
destructive only, drew out from publicans and sinners yearn- 
ings which were incomprehensible, and feelings which were 
misunderstood, vindicated the beauty of the original inten- 
tion, showed the Divine Order below the chaos, exhibited to 
the world once more a human soul in the form in which Go(3 
had made it, sayintr to the dry bones " Live 1" 



370 Christ's Estimate of Sin, 

Only what in the great foreigner was a taste, in Christ was 
love. In the one the gratification of an enlightened curiosi* 
ty: in the other the gratification of a sublime aifection. In 
the philosopher it was a longing to restore and reproduce 
the past. In Christ a hope for the future — " to seek and to 
save that which was lost." 

m, A peculiarity in His mode of treatment. How were 
these lost ones to be restored ? The human plans are reducible 
to three. Governments have tried chastisement for the rec- 
lamation of offenders. For ages that was the only expedi- 
ent known either to Church or State. Time has written 
upon it failure. I do not say that penal severity is not need- 
ful. Perhaps it is, for protection, and for the salutary ex- 
pression of indignation against certain forms of evil. But as 
a system of reclamation it has failed. Did the rack ever re- 
claim in heart one heretic ? Did the scafifold ever soften one 
felon ? One universal fact of history replies ; where the 
penal code was most sanguinary, and when punishments 
were most numerous, crime was most abundant. 

Again, society has tried exclusion for life. I do not pre- 
tend to say that it may not be needful. It may be necessary 
to protect your social purity by banishing offenders of a cer- 
tain sort forever. I only say for recovery it is a failure. 
Whoever knew one case where the ban of exclusion was 
hopeless, and the shame of that exclusion reformed ? Did 
we ever hear of a fallen creature made moral by despair ? 
Name, if you can, the publican or the harlot in any age 
brought back to goodness by a Pharisee, or by the system 
of a Pharisee. 

And once more, some governors have tried the system of 
indiscriminate lenity : they forgave great criminals, trusting 
all the future to gratitude : they passed over great sins, they 
sent away the ringleaders of rebellion with honors heaped 
upon them: they thought this was the Gospel: they expect- 
ed dramatic emotion to work wonders. How far this miser- 
able system has succeeded, let those tell us who have studied 
the history of our South African colonies for the last twenty 
years. We were tired of cruelty — we tried sentiment — wc 
trusted to feeling. Feeling failed : we only made hypo- 
crites, and encouraged rebellion by impunity. Inexorable 
severity, rigorous banishment, indiscriminate and mere for- 
givingness — all are failures. 

In Christ's treatment of guilt we find three peculiarities: 
Sympathy, holiness, firmness. 

1. By human sympathy. In the treatment of Zaccheuji 



Christ's Estimate of Sin. 37 1 

this was almost all We read of almost nothing else as the 
instrument of that wonderful reclamation. One thing only, 
Christ went to his house self-invited. But that one was eV' 
ery thing. Consider it — Zaccheus was, if he were like other 
publicans, a hard and hardened man. He felt people shrink 
from him in the streets. He lay under an imputation : and 
we know how that feeling of being universally suspected 
and misinterpreted makes a man bitter, sarcastic, and de 
fiant. And so the outcast w^ould go home, look at his gold 
rejoice in the revenge he could take by false accusations, 
felt a pride in knowing that they might hate, but could not 
help fearing him : scorned the world, and shut np his heart 
against it. 

At last, one whom all men thronged to see, and all men 
honored, or seemed to honor, came to him, oiFered to go home 
and sup with him. For the first time for many years Zac- 
cheus felt that he was not despised, and the floodgates of 
that avaricious, shut heart were opened in a tide of love and 
generosity. " Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to 
the poor ; and if I have taken any thing from any man by 
false accusation, I restore him fourfold." He was reclaimed 
to human feeling by being taught that he was a man still; 
recognized and treated like a man. A Son of Man had come 
to " seek " him — the lost. 

2. By the exhibition of Divine holiness. 

The holiness of Christ differed from all earthly, common, 
vulgar holiness. Wherever it was, it elicited a sense of sin- 
fulness and imperfection. Just as the purest cut crystal of 
the rock looks dim beside the diamond, so the best men felt 
a sense of guilt growing distinct upon their souls. When 
the Anointed of God came near, " Depart from me," said the 
bravest and truest of them all, "for I am a sinful man, O 
Lord." 

But at the same time the holiness of Christ did not awe 
men away from Him, nor repel them. It inspired them with 
hope. It was not that vulgar unapproachable sanctity which 
makes men awkward in its presence, and stands aloof Its 
peculiar characteristic was that it made men enamored of 
goodness. It '^ drew all men unto Him." This is the differ 
ence between greatness that is first-rate and greatness which 
is second-rate — between heavenly and earthly goodness. 
The second-rate and the earthly draws admiration on itself. 
You say, " how great an act — how good a man !" The first* 
rate and the heavenly imparts itself — inspires a spirit. You 
feel a kindred something in you that rises up to meet it, 
and draws you out of yourself, making you better than you 



372 The Sanctification of Christ. 

were before, and opening out the infinite possibilities of youi 
life and soul. 

And such pre-eminently was the holiness of Christ. Had 
some earthly great or good one come to Zaccheus's house, a 
prince or a nobleman, his feeling would have been, What 
condescension is there ! But when He came whose every 
word and act had in it life and power, no such barren reflec- 
tion was the result : but instead, the beauty of holiness had 
become a power within him, and a longing for self-consecra- 
tion. " Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the 
poor : and if I have taken any thing from any man by false 
accusation, I restore him fourfold." 

By Divine sympathy, and by the Divine Image exhibited 
in the speaking act of Christ, the lost was sought and saved. 
He was saved, as alone all fallen men can be saved. "Be- 
holding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, he was changed 
into the same image." And this is the very essence of the 
Gospel of Jesus Christ. We are redeemed by the life of God 
without us, manifested in the person of Christ, kindling into 
flame the life of God that is within us. Without Him we 
can do nothing. Without Him the warmth that was in 
Zaccheus's heart would have smouldered uselessly away. 
Through Him it became life and light, and the lost was 
saved. 



XVI. 
THE SANCTH^ICATION OF CHRIST. 

"And for tlieir sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified 
through the truth." — John xvii. 19. 

The prayer in which these words occur is given to us by 
the Apostle John alone. Perhaps only St. John could give 
it, for it belongs to the peculiar province of his revelation. 
He presents us with more of the heart of Christ than the 
other apostles : with less of the outward manifestations. He 
gives us more conversations, fewer miracles : more of the in 
ner life, more of what Christ was, less of what Christ did. 

St. John's mind was not argumentative, but intuitive 
There are two ways of reaching truth : by reasoning it out 
and by feeling it out. All the profoundest truths are felt 
out. The deep glances into truth are got by love. Love a 
man, that is the best way of understanding him. Feel a 
truth, that is the only way of comprehending it. 



The Sanctification of Christ. 373 

JN"ot that you can put your sense of such truths into words 
m the shape of accurate maxims or doctrines : but the truth 
is reached, notwithstanding.* 

iNow St. John felt out truth. He understood his Lord by 
loving him. You find no long trains of argument in St. 
John's writings : an atmosphere of contemplation pervades 
all. Brief, full sentences, glowing with imagery of which 
the mere prose intellect makes nonsense, and which a warm 
heart alone interprets, that is the character of his writing i 
very different from the other apostles'. St. Peter's knowl- 
edge of Christ was formed by impetuous mistakes, corrected 
slowly and severely. St. Paul's Christianity was formed by 
principles wrought out glowing hot, as a smith hammers out 
ductile iron, in his unresting, earnest fire of thought, where 
the Spirit dwelt in warmth and light forever, kindling the 
Divine fire of inspiration. St. John and St. John's Christian- 
ity were formed by personal view of Christ, by intercourse 
with Him, and by silent contemplation. Slowly, month by 
month and year by year, he gazed on Christ in silence and 
thoughtful adoration : " reflecting as from a glass the glory 
of the Lord," he became like Him — caught His tones. His 
modes of thought. His very expressions, and became partaker 
of His inward life. A " Christ was formed in him." 

Hence it was that this prayer was revealed to St. John 
alone of the apostles, and by him alone recorded for us. 
The Saviour's mind touched his : through secret sympathy 
he was inspired with the mystic consciousness of what had 
passed and what was passing in the deeps of the soul of 
Christ. Its secret longings and its deepest struggles were 
known to John alone. 

This particular sentence in the prayer which I have taken, 
for the text was peculiarly after the heart of the Apostle 
John. For I have said that to him the true life of Christ 
was rather the inner life than the outward acts of life. Now 
this sentence from the lips of Jesus speaks of the atoning 
sacrifice as an inward mental act rather than as an outward 
deed : a self-consecration wrought out in the will of Christ. 
For their sakes I am sanctifying myself. That is a resolve — • 
a secret of the inner life. No wonder that it was recorded 
by St. John. The text has two parts. 

L The sanctification of Jesus Christ. 
n. The sanctification of His people. 

L Christ's sanctification of himself! "For their sakes I 
sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through 
* Compare 1 Cor. ii. 15, 16. 



374 The Sanctijication of Christ, 

the truth." We must explain this word " sanctify ;" upon it 
the whole meaning turns. Clearly it has not the ordinary 
popular sense here of making holy. Christ was holy. H« 
could not by an inward effort or struggle makb Himself 
holy, for He was that already. Let us trace the history of 
the word " sanctify " in the early pages of the Jewish his^ 
tory. 

When the destroying angel smote the first-born of the 
Egyptian families, the symbolic blood on the lintel of every 
Hebrew house protected the eldest born from the plague of 
death. In consequence, a law of Moses viewed every eldest 
son in a peculiar light. He was reckoned as a thing devoted 
to the Lord — redeemed, and therefore set apart. The word 
used to express this devotion is sanctify. "The Lord said 
unto Moses, Sanctify unto me all the first-born, whatsoever 
openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both of 
man and of beast : it is mine." By a subsequent arrange- 
ment these first-born were exchanged for the Levites. In- 
stead of the eldest son in each family, a whole tribe was 
taken, and reckoned as set apart and devoted to Jehovah, 
just as now a substitute is provided to serve in war in 
another's stead. Therefore the tribe of Levi were said to be 
sanctified to God. 

Ask we what was meant by saying that the Levites were 
sanctified to God ? The ceremony of their sanctification will 
explain it to us. It was a very significant one. The priest 
touched with the typical blood of a sacrificed animal the Le- 
vite's right hand, right eye, right foot. This was the Le- 
vite's sanctification. It devoted every faculty and every 
power — of seeing, doing, walking, the right-hand faculties — 
the best and choicest — to God's peculiar service. He was a 
man set apart. To sanctify, therefore, in the Hebrew phrase, 
meant to devote or consecrate. Let us pause for a few mo- 
ments to gather up the import of this ceremony. 

The first-born are a nation's hope: they may be said to 
represent a whole nation. The consecration, therefore, of the 
first-born was the consecration of the entire nation by their 
representatives, Now the Levites were substituted for the 
first-born. The Levites consequently represented all Israel ; 
and by their consecration the life of Israel was declared to 
be in idea and by right a consecrated life to God. But fur- 
ther still. As the Levites represented Israel, so Israel itself 
was but a part taken for the whole, and represented the 
whole human race. If any one thinks this fanciful, let him 
remember the principle of representation on which the whole 
Jewish system was built. For example — the first-fruits of 



The Sanctijication of Christ 375 

the harvest were consecrated to God. Why ? to declare 
that portion and that only to be God's ? No ; St. Paul says 
as a part for the whole, to teach and remind that the whole 
harvest was his. " If the first-fruits be holy, the lump also 
is holy." So in the same way, God consecrated a peculiar 
people to himself? Why? The Jews say because they 
alone are His. We say, as a part representative of the 
whole, to show in one nation what all are meant to be. The 
holiness of Israel is a representative holiness. Just as the 
consecrated Levite stood for what Israel was meant to be, 
80 the anointed and sepamted nation represents forever what 
the whole race of man is in the Divine Idea — a thing whose 
proper life is perpetual consecration. 

One step farther. This being the true life of humanity, 
name it how you will, sanctification, consecration, devotion, 
sacrifice, Christ the Representative of the Race, submits 
Himself in the text to the universal law of this devotion. 
The true law of every life is consecration to God : therefore 
Christ says, I consecrate myself: else He had not been a 
Man in God's idea of Manhood — for the idea of Man which 
God had been for ages laboring to give through a consecra- 
ted tribe and a consecrated nation to the world, was the idea 
of a being whose life-law is sacrifice, every act and every 
thought being devoted to God. 

Accordingly, this is the view which Christ Himself gave 
of His own Divine humanity. He spoke of it as of a thing 
devoted by a Divine decree. " Say ye of Him, w^hom the 
Father hath sanctified^ and sent into the world, Thou blas- 
phemest ; because I said I am the Son of God ?" 

We have reached, therefore, the meaning of this word in 
the text, " For their sakes I sanctify," ^. e., consecrate or de- 
vote " myself" The first meaning of sanctify is to set apart. 
But to set apart for God is to devote or consecrate ; and to 
consecrate a thing is to make it holy. And thus we have 
the three meanings of the word, viz., to set apart, to devote, 
to make holy — rising all out of one simple idea. To go 
somewhat into particulars. This sanctification is spoken of 
here chiefly as threefold : Self-devotion by inward resolve ; 
self devotion to the truth ; self-devotion for the sake of 
others. 

1. He devoted Himself Jy inward resolve. " I sanctify my- 
self" God His Father had devoted Him before. He had 
sanctified and sent Him. It only remained that this devo- 
tion should become by His own act — se^/'-devotion : com- 
pleted by His own will. Now in that act of will consisted 
His sanctification of Himself. 



37^ The Sa7tctification of Christ, 

For observ^e, this was done within : in secret, solitary 
struggle — in wrestling with all temptations which deterred 
Him from His work — in resolve to do it unflinchingly : in 
real human battle and victory. 

Therefore this self-sanctification applies to the whole tone 
and history of His mind. He was forever devoting Himself 
to work — forever bracing His human spirit to sublime re- 
solve. But it applies peculiarly to certain special moments, 
when some crisis came, as on this present occasion, which 
called for an act of will. 

The first of these moments which we read of came when 
He was twelve years of age. We pondered on it a few 
weeks ago. In the temple, that earnest conversation with 
the doctors indicates to us that He had begun to revolve 
His own mission in His mind ; for the answer to His moth- 
er's expostulations shows us what had been the subject of 
those questions He had been putting : " Wist ye not that I 
must be about my Father's business ?" Solemn words, sig- 
nificant of a crisis in His mental history. He had been ask- 
ing those doctors about His Father's business : what it was, 
and how it was to be done by Him of whom He had read in 
the prophets, even Himself This was the earliest self-devo- 
tion of Messiah : the boy was sanctifying Himself for life 
and manhood's work. 

The next time was in that preparation of the wilderness 
which we call Christ's temptation. You can not look deep- 
ly into that strange story without perceiving that the true 
meaning of it lies in this, that the Saviour in that conflict 
was steeling His soul against the threefold form in which 
temptation presented itself to Him in after-life, to mar or 
neutralize His riiinistry. 

1. To convert the hard, stony life of duty into the comfort 
and enjoyment of this life : to barter, like Esau, life for pot- 
tage : to use Divine powers in Him only to procure bread of 
earth. 

2. To distrust God, and try impatiently some wild, sud- 
den plan, instead of His meek and slow-appointed ways— to 
cast Himself from the temple, as we dash ourselves against 
our destiny. 

3. To do homage to the majesty of wrong: to worship 
evil for the sake of success : to make the world His own by 
force or by crooked policy, instead of by sufiering. 

These were the temptations of His life, as they are of ours. 
If you search through His history, you find that all trial was 
reducible to one or other of these three forms. In the wil- 
derness His soul foresaw them all; they were all in spirit 



The Sanctijicatiori of Christ. 377 

met then, fought and conquered before they came in theif 
reality. In the wilderness He had sanctified and consecra- 
ted Himself against all possible temptation, and life thence- 
forward was only the meeting of that in fact which had 
been in resolve met already — a vanquished foe. 

I said He had sanctified Himself against every trial : I 
should have said, against every one except the last. The 
temptation had not exhibited the terrors and the form of 
death : He had yet to nerve and steel Himself to that. And 
hence the lofty sadness which characterizes His later minis- 
try, as he went down from the sunny mountain-tops of life 
into the darkening shades of the valley where lies the grave. 
There is a perceptible difference between the tone of His 
earlier and that of His later ministry, which by its evidently 
undesigned truthfulness gives us a strong feeling of the re- 
ality of the history. 

At first all is bright, full of hope, signalized by success 
and triumph. You hear from Him joyous words of antici- 
pated victory : " I beheld Satan as lightning fall from 
heaven." And we recollect how His first sermon in the 
synagogue of Capernaum was hailed; how all eyes were fix- 
ed on Him, and His words seemed full of grace. 

Slowly after this there comes a change over the spirit of 
His life. The unremitting toil becomes more superhuman, 
" I must work the work of Him that sent Me while it is 
day : the night cometh when no man can work." The cold 
presentiment of doom hangs more often on Him. He begins 
to talk to His disciples in mysterious hints of the betrayal 
and the cross. He is going down into the cloud-land, full 
of shadows where nothing is distinct, and His step becomes 
more solemn, and His language more deeply sad. Words 
of awe, the words as of a soul struggling to pierce through 
thick glooms of mystery, and doubt, and death, come more 
often from His lips : for instance, " Now is My soul troub- 
led : and what shall I say ? Father, save Me from this hour r 
but for this cause came I into the world." " My soul is ex- 
ceeding sorrowful, even unto death." And here in the text 
is another of those sentences of mournful grandeur : " For 
their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also might be sancti- 
fied through the truth." 

Observe the present tense. Not I shall devote Myself — 
but I sanctify, i. e., I am sanctifying Myself It was a men- 
tal struggle going on then. This prayer was, so to speak, 
part of His Gethsemane prayer, the first utterances of it— 
broken by interruption — then finished in the garden. The 
consecration and the agony had begun — the long inwarc^ 



37^ The Sanctijication of Christ. 

battle — which was not complete till the words came, too 
solemnly to be called triumphantly, though they w^ere in' 
deed the trumpet-tones of man's grand victory, " It is fin- 

Secondly the sanctification of Christ was self-devotion to 
the truth. I infer this, because He says, " I sanctify Myself, 
that they also might be sanctified through the truth.'' 
" Also " implies that what His consecration was, theirs was. 
Now theirs is expressly said to be sanctification by the 
truth. That, then, w^as His consecration too. It w^as the 
truth which devoted Him and marked Him out for death. 

For it w^as not merely death that made Christ's sacrifice 
the world's atonement. There is no special virtue in mere 
death, even though it be the death of God's own Son. 
Blood does not please God. " As I live, saith the Lord, I 
have no pleasure in the death of the sinner." Do you think 
God has pleasure in the blood of the righteous ? blood mere- 
ly as blood ? death merely as a debt of nature paid ? sufier- 
ing merely, as if sufiering had in it mysterious virtue ? 

No, my brethren ! God can be satisfied with that only 
which pertains to the conscience and the will ; so says the 
writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews : " Sacrifices could nev- 
er make the comers thereunto perfect." The blood of Christ 
was sanctified by the will w^ith which He shed it : it is that 
which gives it value. It was a sacrifice offered up to con- 
science. He sutfered as a martyr to the truth. He fell in 
fidelity to a cause. The sacred cause in which He fell was 
love to the human race : " Greater love hath no man than 
this, that a man give his life for his friends." Now that 
truth was the cause in which Christ died. We have His 
own words as proof: " To this end w^as I born, and for this 
cause came I into the world, to bear witness to the truth." 

Let us see how His death was a martyrdom of witness to 
truth. 

1. He proclaimed the identity between religion and good- 
ness. He distinguished religion from coi'rect views, accurate 
religious observances, and even from devout feelings. He 
said that to be religious is to be good. " Blessed are the 
pure in heart .... Blessed are the merciful .... Blessed 
are the meek." Justice, mercy, truth — these He proclaimed 
as the real righteousness of God. 

But because He taught the truth of Godliness, the Phari- 
pees became his enemies : those men of opinions and maxims, 
those men of ecclesiastical, ritual and spiritual pretensions. 

Again, He taught spiritual religion. God was not in the 
temple : the temple was to come dow^n. But religion would 



The Sanctification of Christ, 379 

survive the temple. God's temple was man's soul ; and be- 
cause He taught spiritual worship, the priests became his en- 
emies. Hence came those accusations that He blasphemed 
the temple : that he had said contemptuously, " Destroy this 
temple, and in three days I will raise it up." 

Once more he struck a death-blow at Jewish exclusive* 
ness : He proclaimed the truth of the character of God. God 
the Father : the hereditary descent from Abraham was noth- 
ing : the inheritance of Abraham's faith was every thing. 
God therefore would admit the Gentiles who inherited that 
faith. For God loved the world, not a private few : not the 
Jew only, not the elder brother who had been all his life at 
home, but the prodigal younger brother too, who had wan- 
dered far and had sinned much. 

Now because He proclaimed this salvation of the Gentiles, 
the whole Jewish nation were offended. The first time he 
ever hinted it at Capernaum, they took Him to the brow of 
the hill whereon their city was built that they might throw 
Him thence. 

And thus by degrees — priests, Pharisees, rulers, rich and 
poor — He had roused them all against Him : and the Divine 
Martyr of the truth stood alone at last beside the cross, when 
the world's life was to be won, without a friend. 

All this we must bear in mind, if we would understand the 
expression, " I sanctify myself" He was sanctifying and 
consecrating Himself for this — to be a witness to the truth — 
a devoted One, consecrated in His heart's deeps to die — loyal 
to truth, even though it should have to give as the reward of 
allegiance, not honors and kingdoms, but only a crown of 
thorns. 

3. The self-sanctification of Christ was for the sake cf oth- 
ers. " For their sakes." He obeyed the law of self-consecra- 
tion for Himself, else He had not been man ; for that law is 
the universal law of our human existence. But he obeyed it 
not for Himself alone, but for others also. It was vicarious 
::!elf-devotion, i. e., instead of others, as the Representative of 
^hem. " For their sakes," as an example, " that they also 
might be sanctified through the truth." 

Distinguish between a model and an example. You copy 
the outline of a model : you imitate the spirit of an example. 
Christ is our example : Christ is not our model. You miLj;ht 
copy the life of Christ : make Him a model in every act : and 
yet you might be not one whit more of a Christian than be- 
fore. You might wash the feet of poor fishermen as He did, 
live a wandering life with nowhere to lay your head. You 
might go about teaching, and never use any worAs but His 



380 The SanctiJicatio7z of Christ 

words, never express a religious truth except in Bible lan- 
guage : have no home, and mix with publicans and harlots. 
Then Christ would be your model : you would have copied 
His life like a picture, line for line, and shadow for shadow ; 
yet you might not be Christlike. 

On the other hand, you might imitate Christ, get his Spirit, 
breathe the atmosphere of thought which He breathed: do 
not one single act which He did, but every act in His spirit : 
you might be rich, whereas He was poor : never teach, where- 
as He was teaching always ; lead a life in all outward partic- 
ulars the very contrast and opposite of His : and yet the spirit 
of His self-devotion might have saturated your whole being, 
and penetrated into the life of every act and the essence of 
every thought. Then Christ would have become your exam- 
ple : for we can only imitate that of which we have caught 
the spirit. 

Accordingly, He sanctified Himself that He might become 
a living, inspiring example, firing men's hearts by love to imita- 
tion — a burning and a shining light shed upon the mystery 
of life, to guide by a spirit of warmth lighting from within. 
In Christ there is not given to us a faultless essay on the love- 
liness of self-consecration, to convince our reason how beau- 
tiful it is : but there is given to us a self-consecrated One : 
a living Truth, a living Person ; a life that was beautiful, a 
death that we feel in our inmost hearts to have been divine : 
and all this in order that the Spirit of that consecrated life 
and consecrated death, through love, and wonder, and deep 
enthusiasm, may pass into us, and sanctify us also to the 
truth in life and death. He sacrificed Himself that we might 
offer ourselves a living sacrifice to God. 

n. Christ's sanctification of His people : " That they also 
mio^ht be sanctified throug^h the truth." 

To sanctify means two things. It means to devote, and it 
means to set apart. Yet these tv/o meanings are but differ- 
ent sides of the same idea : for to be devoted to God is to be 
separated from all that is opposed to God. Those whom 
Christ sanctifies are separated from two things : from the 
world's evil, and from the world's spirit. 

1. From the world's evil. So in verse 15, "I pray not that 
thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou 
ehouldest keep them from the evil." Not from physical evil, 
not from pain : Christ does not exempt his own from such 
kinds of evil. Nay, we hesitate to call pain and sorrow evils, 
when we remember what bright characters they have made, 
und when we recollect that almost all who came to Christ 



The Sanctification of Christ 381 

came impelled by suffering of some kind or other. For ex- 
ample, the Syrophenician woman had been driven to "fall at 
His feet and worship Him," by the anguish of the tormented 
daughter whom she had watched. It was a widow that cast 
into the treasury all her living, and that widow poor. 

Possibly want and woe will be seen hereafter, when this 
world of appearance shall have passed away, to have been, 
not evils, but God's blessed angels and ministers of His most 
parental love. 

But the evil from which Christ's sanctification separates 
the soul is that worst of evils — properly speaking the only 
evil — sin : revolt from God, disloyalty to conscience, tyranny 
of the passions, strife of our self-will in conflict with the lov- 
ing will of God. This is our foe — our only foe that we have 
a right to hate with perfect hatred, meet it where we will, and 
under whatever form, in Church or state, in false social max- 
ims, or in our own hearts. And it was to sanctify or separate 
us from this that Christ sanctified or consecrated Himself. 
By the blood of his anguish — by the strength of his uncon- 
querable resolve — we are sworn against it — bound to be, in a 
world of evil, consecrated spirits, or else greatly sinning. 

Lastly, the self-devotion of Christ separates us from the 
world's spirit. 

Distinguish between the world's evil and the world's spirit. 
Many things which can not be classed amongst things evil 
are yet dangerous as things worldly. 

It is one of the most difficult of all ministerial duties to de- 
fine what the world-spirit is. It can not be identified with 
vice, nor can unworldliness be defined as abstinence from vice. 
The Old Testament saints were many of them great trans- 
gressors. Abraham lied, Jacob deceived, David committed 
adultery. Crimes dark, surely ! and black enough ! And 
yet these men were unworldly ; the spirit of the world was 
not in them. They erred and were severely punished; for 
crime is crime in whomsoever it is found, and most a crime 
in a saint of God. But they were beyond their age : they 
were not of the world. They were strangers and pilgrims 
upon earth. They were, in the midst of innumerable temp- 
tations from within and from without, seeking after a better 
country, ^. e., a heavenly. 

Again, you can not say that worldliness consists in mixing 
with many people, and unworldliness with few. Daniel was 
unworldly in the luxurious, brilliant court of Babylon • Adam, 
in Paradise, had but one companion; that one was the world 
to him. 

Again, the spirit of the world can not be defined as con 



382 The Sanctification of Christ 

sisting in any definite plainness of dress or peculiar mode of 
living. If we would be sanctified from the world when Christ 
comes, we must be found, not stripping off the ornaments from 
our persons, but the censoriousness from our tongues and the 
selfishness from our hearts. 

Once more, that which is a sign of unworldliness in one 
age is not a certain sign of it in another. In Daniel's age, 
when dissoluteness marked the world, frugal living was a suf- 
ficient evidence that he was not of the world. To say that 
he restrained his appetites was nearly the same as saying 
that he was sanctified. But now when intemperance is not 
the custom, a life as temperate as Daniel's might coexist with 
all that is worst of the spirit of the world in the heart ; al- 
most no man then was temperate who was not serving God 
• — now hundreds of thousands are self-controlled by prudence, 
who serve the world and self. 

Therefore you can not define sanctification by any outward 
marks or rules. But he who will thoroughly watch will un- 
derstand what is this peculiar sanctification or separation 
from the world which Christ desired in His servants. 

He is sanctified by the self-devotion of his Master from the 
world, who has a life in himself independent of the maxims 
and customs -which sweep along with them other men. In 
his Master's words, "A well of water in him, springing up 
into everlasting life," keeping his life on the whole pure, and 
his heart fresh. His true life is hid with Christ in God. His 
motives, the aims and objects of his life, however inconsist- 
ent they may be with each other, however irregularly or fee- 
bly carried out, are yet on the whole above, not here. His 
citizenship is in heaven. He may be tempted, he may err, 
he may fall, but still in his darkest aberrations there will be 
a something that keeps before him still the dreams and aspi- 
rations of his best days — a thought of the cross of Christ and 
the self-consecration that it typifies — a conviction that that 
is the highest, and that alone the true life. And that — if it 
were only that — would make him essentially different from 
other men, even when he mixes with them and seems to catch 
their tone, among them but not one of them. And that life 
within him is Christ's pledge that he shall be yet what he 
longs to be — a something severing him, separating him, con- 
secrating him. For him and for such as him the consecration 
prayer of Christ was made. " They are not of the world, 
even as I am not of the world: Sanctify them through thy 
truth : thy word is truth." 



The First Miracle. 383 



xvn. 
THE FIRST MIEACLE. 

£. THE GLORY OF THE VIRGIN MOTHER. 

* This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested 
forth his glory ; and his disciples believed on him." — John ii. 11. 

This was the " beginning of miracles " which Jesus did, 
and yet he was now thirty years of age. For thirty years he 
had done no miracle ; and that is in itself almost worthy to 
be called a miracle. That he abstained for thirty years from 
the exertion of His wonder-working power is as marvellous 
as that He possessed for three years the power to exert. He 
was content to live long in deep obscurity. Nazareth, with 
its quiet valley, was world enough for Him. There was no 
disposition to rash into publicity : no haste to be known in 
the world. The quiet consciousness of power which breathes 
in that expression, "Mine hour is not yet come," had marked 
His whole life. He could bide His time. He had the strength 
to wait. 

This was true greatness — the greatness of man, because 
also the greatness of God : for such is God's way in all He 
does. In all the works of God there is a conspicuous absence 
of haste and hurry. All that He does ripens slowly. Six 
slow days and nights of creative forca before man was made : 
two thousand years to discipline and form a Jewish people : 
four thousand years of darkness, and ignorance, and crime, 
before the fullness of the time had come, when He could send 
forth His Son : unnumbered ages of war before the thousand 
years of solid peace can come. Whatever contradicts this 
Divine plan must pay the price of haste — brief duration. All 
that is done before the hour is come decays fast. All preco- 
cious things ripened before their time, wither before their 
time : precocious fruit, precocious minds, forced feelings. "He 
that believeth shall not make haste." 

We shall distribute the various thoughts which this event 
suggests under two heads. 

L The glory of the Virgin Mother. 
XL The glory of the Divine Son. 

I. The glory of the Virgin Mother. 

In the First Epistle to the Corinthians St Paul speaks of 



384 The First Miracle. 

the glory of the woman as of a thing distinct from the giory 
of the man. They are the two opposite poles of the sphere 
of humanity. Their provinces are not the same, but differ- 
ent. The qualities w^hich are beautiful as predominant in 
one are not beautiful when predominant in the other. That 
which is the glory of the one is not the glory of the other. 
The glory of her who was highly favored among women, 
and whom all Christendom has agreed in contemplating as 
the type and ideal of her sex, was glory in a different order 
from that in which her Son exhibited the glory of a perfect 
manhood. A gloiy different in degree^ of course : the one 
was only human, the other more than human, the Word 
made flesh ; but different in order too : the one manifesting 
forth her glory — the grace of womanhood ; the other mani- 
festing forth His glory — the wisdom and the majesty of 
manhood, in which God dwelt. 

Different orders or kinds of glory. Let us consider thft 
glory of the Virgin, which is, in other words, the glory of 
what IS womanly in character. 

1. Remarkable, first of ail, in this respect, is her consldei 
ateness. There is gentle, womanly tact in those words, " Thej 
have no wine." Unselfish thoughtfulness about others' com 
forts, not her own : delicate anxiety to save a straitened 
family from the exposure of their poverty : and moreover, 
for this is very worthy of observation,, carefulness about 
gross, material things : a sensual thing, we might truly say 
— wine, the instrument of intoxication : yet see how her 
feminine tenderness transfigured and sanctified such gross 
and common things ; how that wine which, as used by the 
revellers of the banquet, might be coarse and sensual, was 
in her use sanctified, as it was by unselfishness and charity \ 
a thing quite heavenly, glorified by the ministry of love. 

It was so that in old times, with thoughtful hospitality, 
Rebekah offered water at the well to Abraham's Avay-worn 
servant. It was so that Martha showed her devotion to hei 
Lord even to excess, being cumbered with much serving. 
It was so that the women ministered to Christ out of their 
substance — water, food, money. They took these low things 
of earth, and spiritualized them into means of hospitality anc** 
devotion. 

And this is the glory of womanhood : surely no common 
glory : surely one which, if she rightly comprehended her 
place on earth, might enable her to accept its apparent hu- 
miliation unrepiningly ; the glory of unsensualizing coarse 
and common things, sensual things, the objects of mere 
bense, meat and drink and household cares, elevating them. 



The Glory of the Virgin Mother. 385 

hj the spirit in which she ministers them, into something 
transfigured and sublime. 

The humblest mother of a poor family who is cumbered 
with much serving, or watching over a hospitality which she 
is too poor to delegate to others, or toiling for love's sake in 
household work, needs no emancipation in God's sight. It 
is the prerogative and the glory of her womanhood to con- 
secrate the meanest things by a ministry which is not for 
self. 

2. Submission. "Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it." 
Here is the true spirit of obedience. Not slavishness, but 
entire loyalty and perfect trust in a person whom we rever- 
ence. She did not comprehend her Son's strange repulse and 
mysterious words ; but she knew that they were not capri- 
cious words, for there was no caprice in Him : she knew that 
the law which ruled His will was right, and that importunity 
was useless. So she bade them reverently wait in silence till 
His time should come. 

Here is another distinctive glory of womanhood. In the 
very outset of the Bible submission is revealed as her pe- 
culiar lot and destiny. If you were merely to look at the 
words as they stand, declaring the results of the Fall, you 
would be inclined to call that vocation of obedience a curse ; 
but in the spirit of Christ it is transformed, like labor, into a 
blessing. In this passage a twofold blessing stands con- 
nected with it. Freedom from all doubt ; and prevailing 
power in prayer. 

The first is freedom from all doubt. The Virgin seems to 
have felt no perplexity at that rebuke and seeming refusal ; 
and yet perplexity and misgiving would seem natural, A 
more masculine and imperious mind would have been start- 
led ; made sullen, or have begun at once to sound the depths 
of metaphysics, reasoning upon the hardship of a lot whieh 
can not realize all it wishes: w^ondering why such simple 
blessings are refused, pondering deeply on Divine decrees, 
ending perhaps in skepticism, Mary was saved from this. 
She could not understand, but she could trust and wait. 
Not for one moment did a shade of doubt rest upon her 
heart. At once and instantly, " Whatsoever He saith unto 
you, do it." And so, too, the Syrophenician woman was not 
driven to speculate on the injustice of her destiny by the 
seeming harshness of Christ's reply. She drew closer to her 
Lord in prayer. Affection and submissiveness saved them 
both from doubt. True women both. 

Now there are whole classes of our fellow-creatures to 
whom, as a class, the anguish of religious doubt never or 

N 



386 The First Miracle, 

rarely comes. Mental doubt rarely touches women. SoL 
diers and sailors do not doubt. Their religion is remarkable 
for its simplicity and childlike character. Scarcely ever are 
religious warriors tormented with skepticism or doubts. 
And in all, I believe, for the same reason — the habits of feel- 
ing to which the long life of obedience trains the soul. 
Prompt, quick, unquestioning obedience : that is the soil for 
faith. 

I call this, therefore, the glory of womanhood. It is the 
true glory of human beings to obey. It is her special glory, 
rising out of the very weakness of her nature^God's strength 
made perfect in weakness. England will not soon forget 
that lesson left her as the bequest of a great life. Her bur- 
ied Hero's glory came out of that which was manliest in his 
character — the Virgin's spirit of obedience. 

The second glory resulting from it is prevailing power 
with God. Her wish was granted. " What have I to do 
with thee," were words that only asserted His own perfect 
independence. They were not the language of rebuke. As 
Messiah He gently vindicated His acts from interference, 
showing the filial relation to be in its first strictness dis- 
solved. But as Son He obeyed, or to speak more properly, 
complied. Nay, probably His look had said that already, 
promising more than His words, setting her mind at rest, 
and granting the favor she desired. 

Brethren, the subject of prayer is a deep mystery. To 
the masculine intellect it is a demonstrable absurdity. For 
says logic, how can man's will modify the will of God, or. 
alter the fixed decree ? And if it can not, wherein lies the 
use of prayer? But there is a something mightier than in- 
tellect and truer than logic. It is the faith which works by 
love — the conviction that in this world of mystery, that 
which can not be put in words, nor defended by argument, 
may yet be true. The will of Christ was fixed, what could 
be the use of intercession ? and yet the Virgin's feeling was 
true ; she felt her prayer would prevail. 

Here is a grand paradox, which is the paradox of all 
prayer. The heart hopes that which to reasoning seems im* 
possible. And I believe we never pray aright except when 
we pray in that feminine childlike spirit which no logic can 
defend, feeling as if we modified the will of God, though that 
will is fixed. It is the glory of the spirit that is affectionate 
and submissive that it, ay and it alone, can pray, because it 
alone can believe that its prayer will be granted ; and it is 
the glory of that spirit, too, that its prayer will be granted. 

3. In all Christian ages the especial glory ascribed to the 



The Glory of the Virgin Mother, 387 

Virgin Mother is purity of heart and life. Implied in the 
term "Virgin." Gradually in the history of the Christian 
Church the recognition of this became idolatry. The works 
of early Christian art curiously exhibit the progress of this 
perversion. They show how Mariolatry grew up. The first 
pictures of the early Christian ages simply represent the 
woman. By-and-by we find outlines of the mother and the 
child. In an after-age the Son is seen sitting on a throne, with 
the mother crowned, but sitting as yet below Him. In an 
age still later, the crowned mother on a level with the Son. 
Later still, the mother on a throne above the Son. And last- 
ly, a Romish picture represents the eternal Son in wrath, 
about to destroy the earth, and the Virgin Intercessor inter« 
posing, pleading by significant attitude her maternal rights, 
and redeeming the world from His vengeance. Such was, iu 
fact, the progress of Virgin- worship. First the woman rev- 
erenced for the Son's sake; then the woman reverenced 
above the Son, and adored. 

Now the question is. How came this to be ? for we assume 
it as a principle that no error has ever spread widely that was 
not the exaggeration or perversion of a truth. And be as* 
sured that the first step towards dislodging error is to un- 
derstand the truth at which it aims. Never can an error be 
permanently destroyed by the roots, unless we have planted 
by its side the truth that is to take its place. Else you will 
find the falsehood returning forever, growing up again when 
you thought it cut up root and branch, appearing in the very 
places where the crushing of it seemed most complete. 
Wherever there is a deep truth, unrecognized, misunderstood, 
it will force its way into men's hearts. It will take perni- 
cious forms if it can not find healthful ones. It will grow as 
some weeds grow, in noxious forms, ineradicably, because it 
has a root in human nature. 

Else how comes it to pass, after three hundred yeai*s of 
reformation, we find Virgin-worship restoring itself again in 
this reformed England, where least of all countries we should 
expect it, and where the remembrance of Romish persecu- 
tion might have seemed to make its return impossible ? 
How comes it that some of the deepest thinkers of our day, 
and men of the saintliest lives, are feeling this Virgin-worship 
a necessity for their souls ; for it is the doctrine to which the 
converts to Romanism cling most tenaciously ? 

Brethren, I reply. Because the doctrine of the worship of 
the Virgin has a root in truth, and no mere cutting and up- 
rooting can destroy it : no thunders of Protestant oratory : 
ao platform expositions : no Reformation societies. In ontj 



388 The First Miracle. 

word, no mere negations; nothing but the full liberation of 
the truth which lies at the root of error can eradicate error. 

Surely we ought to have learnt that truth by this time. 
Recollect how, before Christ's time, mere negations failed to 
uproot paganism. Philosophers had disproved it by argu- 
ment : satirists had covered it with ridicule. It was slain a 
thousand times, and yet paganism lived on in the hearts of 
men : and those who gave it up returned to it again in a 
dying hour, because the disprovers of it had given nothing 
for the heart to rest on in its place. But when Paul dared 
to proclaim of paganism what we are proclaiming of Virgin- 
worship, that paganism stood upon a truth, and taught that 
truth, paganism fell forever. The Apostle Paul found in 
Athens an altar to the unknown God. He did not announce 
in Athens lectures against heathen priestcraft ; nor did he 
undertake to prove it, in the Areopagus, all a mystery of in- 
iquity, and a system of damnable idolatries — that is the 
mode in which we set about our controversies; but he dis- 
engaged the truth from the error, proclaimed the truth, and 
left the errors to themselves. The truth grew up, and the 
errors silently and slowly withered. 

I pray you. Christian brethren, do not join those fierce as- 
sociations* which think only of uprooting error. There is a 
spirit in them which is more of earth than heaven, short- 
sighted too and self-destructive. They do not make converts 
to Christ, but only controversialists, and adherents to a par- 
ty. They compass sea and land to make one proselyte. It 
matters little whether fierce Romanism or fierce Protestant- 
ism wins the day : but it does matter whether or not in the 
conflict we lose some precious Christian truth, as well as the 
very spirit of Christianity. 

What lies at the root of this ineradicable Virgin-worship ? 
How comes it that out of so few Scripture sentences about 
her, many of them like this rebuke, depreciatory, learned men 
and pious men could ever have developed^ as they call it, or 
as it seems to us, tortured and twisted a doctrine of Divine 
honors to be paid to Mary ? Let us set out with the con- 
viction that there must have been some reason for it, some 
truth of which it is the perversion. 

I believe the truth to be this. Before Christ the qualities 
honored as Divine were peculiarly the virtues of the man : 
courage, wisdom, truth, strength. But Christ proclaimed the 
Divine nature of qualities entirely opposite : meekness, obe- 
dience, affection, purity. He said that the pure in lieart 
should see God. He pronounced the beatitudes of meekness, 
and lowliness, and poverty of spirit. Now observe these 



The Glory of the Virgin Mother. 389 

were all of the order of graces which are distinctively femi' 
nine. And it is the peculiar feature of Christianity that it 
exalts not strength nor intellect, but gentleness, and loving- 
uess, and virgin purity. 

Here was a new, strange thought given to the world. It 
w^as for many ages the thought : no w^onder — it was the one 
great novelty of the revealed religion. How^ were men to 
find expression for that idea which was working in them, 
vague and beautiful, but wanting substance ? the idea of the 
Divineness of what is pure, above the Divineness of what is 
strong? Would you have had them say simply, we had 
forgotten these things ; now they are revealed — now we know 
that love and purity are as Divine as power and reason ? My 
brethren, it is not so that men loorship — it is only so that men 
think. They think about qualities — they w^orship persons. 
Worship must have a form. Adoration finds a person, and if 
it can not find one it will imagine one. Gentleness and purity 
are words for a philosopher ; but a man whose heart wants 
something to adore will find for himself a gentle one, a pure 
one, incarnate purity and love, gentleness robed in flesh and 
blood, before whom his knee may bend, and to whom the 
homage of his spirit can be given. You can not adore except 
a person. 

What marvel if the early Christian found that the Virgin- 
mother of our Lord embodied this great idea ? What marvel 
if he filled out and expanded with that idea w^hich was in his 
heart, the brief sketch given of her in the Gospels, till his 
imagination had robed the woman of the Bible w^ith the 
majesty of the mother of God ? Can we not/eeZ that it must 
have been so ? Instead of a dry, formal dogma of theology, 
the Romanist presented an actual woman, endued wdth every 
inward grace and beauty, and pierced by sorrows, as a living 
object of devotion, faith, and hoj)e — a personality instead of 
an abstraction. Historically speaking, it seems inevitable 
that the idea could scarcely have been expressed to the world 
except through an idolatry. 

Brethren, it is an idolatry : in modern Romanism a perni* 
cious and most defiling one. The worship of Mary over- 
shadow^s the worship of the Son. The love given to her is 
so much taken from Him. Nevertheless, let us not hide from 
ourselves the eternal truth of the idea that lies beneath the 
temporary falsehood of the dogma. Overthrow the idolatry ; 
but do it by substituting the truth. 

Now the truth which alone can supplant the worship of the 
Virgin is the perfect humanity of Jesus Christ. I say the 
perfect humanity : for perfect manhood is a very ambiguoua 



390 The First Miracce. 

expression. By man we sometimes mean the human race, 
made up of man and woman, and sometimes we only mean the 
masculine sex. We have only one word to express both 
ideas. The lansruas^e in which the New Testament was 
written has two. Hence we may make a great mistake. 
When the Bible speaks of man the human being, we may 
think that it means man the male creature. When the 
Bible tells us Jesus Christ w^as the Son of Man, it uses the 
word which implies human being: it does not use the word 
which signifies one of the male sex : it does not dwell on the 
fact that He was a man : but it earnestly asserts that He was 
Man. Son of a man He was not. Son of Man He was : for 
the blood, as it were, of all the race was in His veins. 

Now let us see what is implied in this expression Son of 
Man. It contains in it the doctrine of the incarnation : it 
means the full humanity of Christ. Lately I tried to bring 
out one portion of its meaning. I said that He belonged to 
no particular age, but to every age. He had not the qualities 
of one clime or race, but that which is common to all climes 
and all races. He was not the Son of the Jew, nor the Son 
of the Oriental — He was the Son of Man. He was not the 
villager of Bethlehem : nor one whose character and mind 
were the result of a ceitain training, peculiar to Judea, or pe- 
culiar to that century — but He was the Man. This is what 
St. Paul insists on, when He says that in Him there is neither 
Jew nor Gentile, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free. A hu 
manity in which there is nothing distinctive, limited, or pe* 
culiar, but universal — your nature and mine, the humanity in 
which we all are brothers, bond or free. Now in that same 
passage St. Paul uses another very remarkable expression : 
" There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor 
free, there is neither male nor female." That is the other 
thing implied in His title to the Son of Man. His nature 
had in it the nature of all nations : but also His heart had in 
it the blended qualities of both sexes. Our humanity is a 
whole made up of two opposite poles of character — the manly 
and the feminine. In the character of Christ neither was 
found exclusively, but both in perfect balance. He was the 
Son of Man — the Human Being — perfect Man. 

There was in Him the woman-heart as well as the manly 
brain — all that was most manly, and all that was most w^om- 
anly. Remember what He was in life : recollect His stern 
iron hardness in the temptation of the desert : recollect the 
calmness that never quailed in all the uproars of the people, 
the truth that never faltered, the strict severe integrity which 
characterized the Witness of the Truth : recollect the justice 



The Glory of the Virgin Mother, 391 

that never gave way to weak feeling — which let the rich 
youDg ruler go his way to perish if he would — which paid 
the tribute-money — which held the balance fair between the 
persecuted woman and her accuser, but did not suffer itself 
to be betrayed by sympathy into any feeble tenderness — the 
justice that rebuked Peter with indignation, and pronounced 
the doom of Jerusalem unswervingly. Here is one side or 
pole of human character — surely not the feminine side. Now 
look at the other. Recollect the twice-recorded tears, which 
a man would have been ashamed to show, and which are 
never beautiful in man except when joined with strength like 
His: and recollect the sympathy craved and yearned for as 
well as given — the shrinking from solitude in prayer — the 
trembling of a sorrow unto death — the considerate care which 
provided bread for the multitude, and said to the tired disci- 
ples, as with a sister's rather than a brother's thoughtfulness, 
" Come ye apart into the desert and rest a while." This is 
the other side or pole of human character — surely not the 
masculine. 

When we have learnt and felt what is meant by Divine 
humanity in Christ, and when we have believed it, not in a 
one-sided way, but in all its fullness, then we are safe from 
Mariolatry — because we do not want it : we have the truth 
which Mariolatry labors to express, and, laboring ignorantly, 
falls into idolatry. But so long as the male was looked upon 
as the only type of God, and the masculine virtues as the 
only glory of His character, so long the truth was yet unre- 
vealed. This was the state of heathenism. And so long as 
Christ was only felt as the Divine Man, and not the Divine 
Humanity, so long the world had only a one-sided truth. 

One-half of our nature, the sternei portion of it, only was 
felt to be of God and in God. The other half, the tenderer 
and the purer qualities of our souls, were felt as earthly. 
This was the state of Romanism from, which men tried to 
escape by Mariolatry. And if men had not learned that this 
side of our nature too was made divine in Christ, what possi- 
ble escape was there for them, but to look to the Virgin 
Mary as the incarnation of the purer and lovelier elements of 
God's character, reserving to her Son the sterner and the 
more masculine ? 

Can we not understand, too, how it came to pass that the 
mother was placed above the Son, and adored more ? Chris- 
tianity had proclaimed meekness, purity, obedience, as more 
Divine than strength and wisdom. What wonder if she 
who was gazed on as the type of purity should be reckoned 
more near to God than He who had come through miscoij- 



392 The First Miracle. 

eeption to be looked on chiefly as the type of Strength and 
aTustice ? 

There is a spirit abroad which is leading men to Rome. 
Do not call that the spirit of the Devil, It is the desire and 
hope to find there in its tenderness, and its beauty, and its 
devotion, a home for those feelings of awe, and contempla- 
tion, and love, for which our stern Protestantism finds no 
shelter. Let us acknowledge that what they worship is 
indeed deserving of all adoration : only let us say that what 
they worship ignorantly is Christ. Whom they ignorantly 
worship let us declare unto them: Christ their unknown 
God, worshipped at an idol-altar. Do not let us satisfy 
ourselves by saying as a watchword, " Christ, not Mary :" 
say rather, "In Christ all that they find in Mary." The 
mother in the Son, the womanly in the soul of Christ. Di- 
vine honor to the feminine side of His character, joyful and 
unvarying acknowledgment that in Christ there is a reve- 
lation of the Divineness of submission, and love, and purity, 
and long-suffering, just as there was before in the name of 
the Lord of Hosts a revelation of the Divineness of courage, 
and strength, and heroism, and manliness. 

Therefore it is we do not sympathize with those coarse 
expositions which aim at doing exclusive honor to the Son 
of God by degrading the life and character of the Virgin. 
Just as the Romanist has loved to represent all connection 
with her as mysterious and immaculate, so has the Prot- 
estant been disposed to vulgarize her to the level of the 
commonest humanity, and exaggerate into rebukes the rev- 
erent expressions to her in which Jesus merely asserted His 
Divine independence. 

Rather reverence, not her, but that idea and type which 
Christianity has given in her — the type of Christian woman- 
hood ; which was not realized in her, which never was and 
never will be realized in one single woman — which remains 
ever a Divine Idea, after which each living woman is to 
strive. 

And when I say reverence that idea or type, I am but 
pointing to the relation between the mother and the Son, 
and asking men to reverence that which He reverenced. 
Think we that there is no meaning hidden in the mystery 
that the Son of God was the Virgin's Son ? To Him through 
life there remained the early recollections of a pure mother. 
Blessed beyond all common blessedness is the man who can 
look back to that. God has given to him a talisman which 
will carry him triumphant through many a temptation. To 
other men purity may be a name ; to him it has been once a 



The Glory of the Divine Son, 393 

realv.y. "Faith in all things high beats with his blood." 
He may be tempted : he may err : but there will be a light 
from home shining forever on his path inextinguishably. 
By the grace of God, degraded he can not be. 



XVIII. 
THE FmST MHIACLE. 

II. THE GLOEY OF THE DIVINE SOIT. 

"This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested 
forth his glory ; and his disciples believed on him." — John ii. 11. 

Ix the history of this miracle two personages are brought 
prominently before our notice. One is the Virgin Mary ; 
the other is the Son of God. And these two exhibit differ- 
ent orders of glory, as well as different degrees. Different 
degrees, for the Virgin was only human : her Son was God 
manifest in the flesh. Different orders of glory, for the one 
exhibited the distinctive glory of womanhood : the Other 
manifested forth His glory — the glory of perfect manhood. 

Taking the Virgin as the type and representative of her 
sex, we found the glory of womanhood, as exhibited by her 
conduct in this parable, to consist in unselfish considerate- 
ness about others, in delicacy of tact, in the power of enno- 
bling a ministry of coarse and household things, like the 
wine of the marriage-feast, by the sanctity of affection : in 
meekness, and lowly obedience, which was in the Fall her 
curse, in Christ become her glory, transformed into a bless- 
ing and a power: and lastly, as the name Virgin implies, 
the distinctive glory of womanhood we found to consist in 
purity. 

Now the Christian history first revealed these great truths. 
The Gospels which record the life of Christ, first, in the his- 
tory of the world, brought to light the Divine glory of those 
qualities which had been despised. Before Christ came, the 
heathen had counted for Divine the legislative wisdom of 
the man, manly strength, manly truth, manly justice, manly 
courage. The life and the cross of Christ shed a splendor 
from heaven upon a new and till then unheard-of order of 
heroism — that which may be called the feminine order, 
meekness, endurance, long-suffering, the passive strength of 
martyrdom. For Christianity does not say, Honor to the 



394 ^'^^ First Miracle, 

wise, but " Blessed are the meek." Not, Glory to the strong, 
but " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 
Not, " The Lord is a man of war, Jehovah is His name," but 
" God is Love." In Christ not intellect, but love, is conse- 
crated. In Christ is magnified, not force of will, but the 
glory of a Divine humility. " He was obedient unto death, 
even the death of the cross : wherefore God also hath highly 
exalted Him." 

Therefore it was, that from that time forward womanhood 
assumed a new place in this world. She in whom these 
qualities, for the first time declared Divine in Christ, were 
the distinctive characteristics, steadily and gradually rose 
to a higher dignity in human life. It is not to a mere civiliza- 
tion, but to the spirit of life in Christ, that woman owes all 
she has, and all she has yet to gain. 

Now the outward phases in which this redemption of the 
sex appeared to the world have been as yet chiefly three. 
There have been three ages through which these great truths 
of the Divineness of purity, and the strength and glory of 
obedience, the peculiar characteristics of womanhood, have 
been rising into their right acknowledgment. 1. The ages 
of Virgin-worship. 2. The ages of chivalry. 3. The age of 
the three last centuries. Now during these three Protestant 
centuries, the place and destinies of womanhood have been 
every year rising more and more into great questions. Her 
mission, as it is called in the cant language of the day — 
what it is — that is one of the subjects of deepest interest in 
the controversies of the day. And unless we are prepared 
to say that the truth w^hich has been growing clearer and 
brighter for eighteen centuries shall stop now exactly where 
it is, and grow no clearer: unless we are ready to affirm that 
mankind will never learn to pay less glory to strength and 
intellect, and more to meekness, and humbleness, and pure- 
ness than they do now, it follows that God has yet reserved 
for womanhood a larger and more glorious field for her 
peculiar qualities and gifts, and that the truth contained in 
the Virgin's motherhood is unexhausted still. 

For this reason, in reference to that womanhood and its 
destinies of which St. Mary is the type, I thought it needful, 
last Sunday, to insist on two things as of profound impor- 
tance. 

L To declare in what her true glory consists. The only 
glory of the Virgin was the glory of true womanhood. The 
glory of true womanhood consists in being herself: not in 
striving to be something else. It is the false paradox and 



The Glory of the Divine Son. 395 

heresy of this present age to claim for her as a glory the 
right to leave her sphere. Her glory lies in her sphere, and 
God has given her a sphere distinct ; as in the Epistle to the 
Church of Corinth, when in that wise chapter St. Paul render- 
ed unto womanhood the things which were woman's, and 
unto manhood the things which were man's. 

And the true correction of that monstrous rebellion against 
what is natural lies in vindicating Mary's glory, on the one 
side, from the Romanist, who gives to her the glory of God ; 
and on the other from those who would confound the dis- 
tinctive glories of the two sexes, and claim as the glory of 
woman what is, in the deeps of nature, the glory of the 
man. 

Every thing is created in its own order. Every created 
thing has its own glory. " There is one glory of the sun, 
another glory of the moon, and another glory of the sta^s * 
for one star differeth from another star in glory." There is 
one glory of manhood, and another glory of womanhood. 
And the glory of each created thing consists in being true 
to its own nature, and moving in its own S2)here. 

Mary's glory was not immaculate origin, nor immaculate 
life, nor exaltation to Divine honors. She had none of these 
things. Nor, on the other hand, was it force or demanded 
rights, social or domestic, that constituted her glory. But it 
was the glory of simple womanhood ; the glory of being 
true to the nature assigned her by her Maker ; the glory of 
motherhood ; the glory of " a meek and quiet spirit, which 
in the sight of God is of great price." She was not the 
queen of heaven, but she was something nobler still, a crea- 
ture content to be what God had made her : in unselfishness, 
and humbleness, and purity, " rejoicing in God her Saviour," 
content that " He had regarded the lowliness of His hand- 
maiden." 

The second thing upon which I insisted was, that the only 
safeguard against the idolatrous error of Virgin-worship is a 
full recognition of the perfect humanity of Christ. A full 
recognition : for it is only a partial acknowledgment of the 
meaning of the incarnation when we think of Him as the 
Divine Man. It was not manhood, but humanity, that was 
made Divine in Him. Humanity has its two sides : one side 
in the strength and intellect of manhood; the other in the 
tenderness, and faith, and submissiveness of womanhood: 
Man and woman, not man alone, make up human nature. In 
Christ not one alone but both were glorified. Strength and 
grace, wisdom and love, courage and purity. Divine manli- 
ness : Divine womanliness. In all noble characters you find 



39^ The First Miracle, 

the two blended : in Him, the noblest, blended into one en. 
tire and perfect humanity. 

Unless you recognize and fully utter this whole truth, you 
will find Mariolatry forever returning, cut it down as you 
will It must come back. It will come back. I had well 
nigh said it ought to come back, unless we preach and believe 
the full truth of God incarnate in humanity. For while we 
iteach in our classical schools as the only manliness. Pa- 
gan heroism of warrior and legislator, can we say that we 
are teaching both sides of Christ ? Our souls were trained 
in boyhood to honor the heroic and the masculine. Who 
ever hinted to us that charity is the " more excellent way ?" 
Who suggested that " he which ruleth his spirit is greater 
than he which taketh a city ?" 

Again, we find our English society divided into two sec- 
tions : one the men of business and action, exhibiting promi- 
nently the masculine virtues of English character, truth and 
honor, and almost taught to reckon forbearance and feeling 
aa proofs of weakness ; taught in the playground to believe 
that a chaste life is romance ; false sentiment and strength- 
lessness of character taught there : and in after-life that it is 
mean to forgive a personal affront. 

The other section of our society is made up of men of 
prayer and religiousness : for some reason or other singular- 
ly deficient in masculine breadth and strength, and even 
truthfulness of character : with no firm footing upon reality, 
not daring to look the real problems of social and political 
life in the face, but wasting their strength in disputes of 
words, or shrinking into a dim atmosphere of ecclesiastical 
dreaminess, unreal and effeminate. Dare we say that the 
full humanity of Christ in its double aspect is practically 
adored amongst us? Have we not made a fatal separation 
between the manly and the feminine sides of character ? be- 
tween the moral and the devout ? so that we have men who 
are masculine and moral, and also men who are effeminate 
and devout. Bnt where are our Christian men in whom the 
whole Christ is formed — all that is brave, and true, and wise, 
and at the same time all that is tender, and devout, and 
\)ure ? Who ever taught us to adore in Christ all that is 
most manly, and all that is most womanly, that we might 
strive to be such in our degree ourselves ? And if not, can 
you wonder that men, feeling their Christianity imperfect, 
blindly strive to patch it up through Mariolatry? 

I gather into a few sentences the substance of what was 
said "last Sunday. I said that Christianity exhibited the 
Divine glory of the weaker elements of our human nature. 



The Glory of the Divine Son. 397 

Heathenism, nay even eTiidaism, had as yet before him only 
recognized the glory of the stronger and masculine. Now 
the Romanist personified the masculine side of human na- 
ture in Christ. He personified gentleness and purity, the 
feminine side of human nature, in the Virgin Mary. No 
wonder that with this cardinal error at the outset in his con- 
ceptions, he adored ; and no wonder, since Christianity de- 
clared meekness and purity more Divine than strength and 
intellect, in process of time he came to honor the Virgin 
more than Christ. That I believe is the true history and 
account of Virgin-worship. 

Thfe Bible personifies both sides of human nature, the mas- 
culine and feminine, in Christ, of whom St. Paul declares in 
the Epistle to the Galatians, " In Him is neither Jew nor 
Greek, bond nor free, male nor female." Neither distinctive- 
ly^ for in him both the manly and the womanly sides of char- 
acter divinely meet. I say therefore that the incarnation of 
God in Christ is the true defense against Virgin- worship. 

Think of Christ only as the masculine character, glorified 
by the union of Godhead with it, and your Christianity has 
in it an awful gap, a void, a want — the inevitable supply and 
relief to which will be Mariolatry, however secure you may 
think yourself; however strong and fierce the language 
you now use. Men who have used language as strong and 
fierce have become idolaters of Mary. With a half thought 
of Christ, safe you are not. But think of him as the Divine 
Human Being, in whom both sides of our double being are 
divine and glorified, and then you have the truth which Ro- 
manism has marred and perverted into an idolatry pernicious 
in all ; in the less spiritual worshippers sensualizing and de- 
basing. 

Now there are two ways of meeting error. The one is that 
in which, in humble imitation of Christ and His apostles, I 
have tried to show you the error of the worship of Mary — to 
discern the truth out of which the error sprung, firmly as- 
serting the truth, forbearing threatening ; certain that he in 
whose mind the truth is lodged has in that truth the safe- 
guard against error. 

The other way of meeting error is to overwhelm it with 
threats. To some men it seems the only way in which true 
zeal is shown. Well, it is very easy, requiring no self-con- 
trol, but only an indulgence of every bad passion. It is very 
easy to call Rome the " mother of harlots and abominations " 
— very easy to use strong language about " damnable idola- 
tries " — very easy for the apostles to call down fire from 
heaven upon the Samaritans because they would not receive 



39^ The First Miracle, 

Christ, and then to flatter themselves that that was godly 
zeal. But it might be well for us to remember his somewhat 
startling comment, " Ye know not what manner of spirit ye 
are of." There are those who think it a surer and a safer 
Protestantism to use those popular watchwords. Be it so. 
But with God's blessing, that will not I. The majesty of 
truth needs other bulwarks than vulgar and cowardly vitu- 
peration. Coarse and violent language, excusable three hun- 
dred years ago by the manners of that day, was bold and 
brave in the lips of the Reformers, with whom the struggle 
was one of life and death, and who might be called to pay 
the penalty of their bold defiances with their blood. Biit the 
same fierceness of language now, when there is no personal 
risk in the use of it, in the midst of hundreds of men and 
women ready to applaud and honor violence as zeal, is simply 
a dastardliness from which every generous mind shrinks. 
You do not get the Reformers' spirit by putting on the ar- 
mor they have done with, but by risking the dangers which 
those noble warriors risked. It is not their big words, but 
their large, brave heart that makes the Protestant. Oh, be 
sure that he whose soul has anchored itself to rest on the 
deep calm sea of truth, does not spend his strength in raving 
against those who are still tossed by the winds of error. 
Spasmodic violence of words is one thing, strength of convic- 
tion is another. 

When, oh when, shall we learn that loyalty to Christ is 
tested far more by the strength of our sympathy with truth 
than by the intensity of our hatred of error ? I w^ill tell you 
what to hate. Hate hypocrisy — hate cant — hate intolerance, 
oppression, injustice — hate Pharisaism — hate them as Christ 
hated them, with a deep, living. Godlike hatred. But do not 
hate men in intellectual error. To hate a man for his errors 
is as unwise as to hate one who in casting up an account has 
made an error against himself The Romanist has made an 
error against himself He has missed the full glory of his 
Lord and Master. Well, shall we hate him, and curse, and 
rant, and thunder at him ? Or, shall we sit down beside him, 
and try to sympathize with him, and see things from his point 
of view, and strive to understand the truth which his soul is 
aiming at, and seize the truth for him and for ourselves, 
" meekly instructing those who oppose themselves?" 

Our subject to-day is the glory of the Divine Son. In that 
miracle " He manifested forth his glory." Concerning that 
glory we say : — 

]. The glory of Christ did not hegin with that miracle : the 
miracle only manifested it. For thirty years the wonder- 



The Glory of the Divine Son, 399 

working power had been in Him. It was not Diviner power 
when it broke forth into visible manifestation than it had 
been when it was unsuspected and unseen. It had been ex- 
ercised up to this time in common acts of youthful life : obe- 
dience to His mother, love to His brethren. Well, it was 
just as Divine in those simple, daily acts, as when it showed 
itself in a way startling and wonderful. It was just as much 
the life of God on earth when He did an act of ordinary hu- 
man love or human duty, as when He did an extraordinary 
act, such as turning water into wine. God was as much, nay 
more, in the daily life and love of Christ, than he was in Christ's 
miracles. The miracle only made the hidden glory visible. 
The extraordinary only proved that the ordinary was Divine. 
That was the very object of the miracle. It was done to man- 
ifest forth his glory. And if, instead of rousing men to see 
the real glory of Christ in His other life, the miracle merely 
fastened men's attention on itself, and made them think that 
the only glory which is Divine is to be found in what is won- 
derful and uncommon, then the w^hole intention of the miracle 
was lost. 

Let us make this more plain by an illustration. To the 
wise man, the lightning only manifests the electric force w^hich 
is everywhere, and which for one moment has become visible. 
As often as he sees it, it reminds him that the lightning slum- 
bers invisibly in the dew-drop, and in the mist, and in the 
cloud, and binds together every atom of the water that he 
uses in daily life. But to the vulgar mind the lightning is 
something unique, a something which has no existence but 
when it a^Dpears. There is a fearful glory in the lightning 
because he sees it. But there is no startling glory and noth- 
ing fearful in the drop of dew, because he does not know, 
what the thinker knows, that the flash is there in all its ter- 
rors. So, in the same way, to the half believer a miracle is 
the one solitary evidence of God. Without it he could have 
no certainty of God's existence. 

But to the true disciple a miracle only manifeMs the pow- 
er and love which are silently at work everywhere — as truly 
and as really in the slow work of the cure of the insane, as in 
the sudden expulsion of the legion from the demoniac — as 
divinely in the gift of daily bread as in the miraculous mul- 
tiplication of the loaves. God's glory is at work in the growth 
of the vine and the ripening of the grape, and the process by 
which grape-juice passes into wine. It is not more glory, but 
only glory more manifested, when water at his bidding passes 
at once into wine. And be sure that if you do not feel as 
David felt, God's presence in the annual miracle, that it is 



400 The First Miracle, 

God^ which in the vintage of every year causeth wine to 
make glad the heart of man, the sudden miracle at Caperna' 
um would not have given you conviction of His presence. 
*' If you hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will you 
be persuaded though one rose from the dead." Miracles have 
only done their work when they teach us the glory and the 
awfulness that surround our common life. In a miracle, God 
for one moment shows Himself that we may remember it is 
He that is at work when no miracle is seen. 

I^ow this is the deep truth of miracles which most men 
miss. They believe that the life of Jesus was Divine, be- 
cause He wrought miracles. But if their faith in miracles 
were shaken, their faith in Christ would go. If the evidence 
for the credibility of those miracles were weakened, then to 
them the mystic glory would have faded off His history. 
They could not be sure that His existence was Divine. 
That love, even unto death, would bear no certain stamp of 
God upon it. That life of long self-sacrifice would have had 
in it no certain unquestionable traces of the Son of God. 

See what that implies. If that be true, and miracles are 
the best proof of Christ's mission, God can be recognized 
only in what is marvellous : God can not be recognized in 
what is good. It is by Divine power that a human Being 
turns water into wine. It is by power less certainly Divine 
that the same Being witnesses to truth — forgives His ene- 
mies — makes it His meat and drink to do His Father's will, 
and finishes His work. We are more sure that God was in 
Christ when he said, "Rise up, and w^alk," than when He 
said with absolving love, " Son, thy sins be forgiven thee :'* 
more certain when He furnished wine for wedding-guests, 
than when He gaid, " Father, forgive them, for they know 
not what they do." Oh, a strange, and low, and vulgar ap- 
preciation this of the true glory of the Son of God ; the same 
false conception that runs through all our life, appearing in 
every form — God in the storm, and the earthquake, and the 
fire — no God in the still small voice. Glory in the lightning- 
flash — no glory and no God in the lowliness of the dew-drop. 
Glory to intellect and genius — no glory to gentleness and 
patience. Glory to every kind of pomer — none to the in- 
ward, invisible strength of the life of God in the soul of man. 

"An evil and an adulterous generation seeketh after a 
sign." Look at the feverish eagerness with which men 
crowd to every exhibition of some newly-discovered force, 
real or pretended. What lies at the bottom of this feverish- 
ness but an unbelieving craving after signs ? some wonder 
which is to show them the Divine life of which the evidence 



The Glory of the Divine Son. 40 \ 

is yet imperfect ? As if the bread they eat and the wine 
they drink, chosen by God for the emblems of His sacra- 
ments because the commonest things of daily life, were not 
filled with the presence of His love ; as if God were not 
around their path and beside their bed, and spying out all 
their daily ways. 

It is in this strange way that we have learned Christ. 
The miracles which were meant to point us to the Divinity 
of His goodness, have only dazzled us with the splendor of 
their power. We have forgotten what His first wonder- 
work shows, that a miracle is only manifested glory. 

2. It was the glory of Christ, again, to sanctify, i. e., declare 
the sacredness of, all things natural — all natural relation- 
ships, all natural enjoyments. 

All natural relationships. "What He sanctified by His 
presence was a marriage. Now remember what had gone 
before this. The life of John the Baptist was the highest 
form of religious life known in Israel. It was the life 
ascetic. It was a life of solitariness and penitential auster- 
ity. He drank no wine : he ate no pleasant food: he mar- 
ried no wife : he entered into no human relationship. It was 
the law of that stern and in its way sublime life, to cut out 
every human feeling as a weakness, and to mortify every 
natural instinct, in order to cultivate an intenser spirituality. 
A life in its own order grand, but indisputably unnatural 

Now the first public act of our Redeemer's life is to go 
with His disciples to a marriage. He consecrates marriage, 
and the sympathies which lead to marriage. He declares 
the sacredness of feelings which had been reckoned carnal, 
and low, and human. He stamped His image on human 
joys, human connections, human relationships. He pro- 
nounces that they are more than human — as it were sacra- 
mental : the means whereby God's presence comes to us ; 
the types and shadows whereby higher and deeper relation- 
ships become possible to us. For it is through our human 
afiections that the soul first learns to feel that its destiny is 
divine : It is through a mortal yearning, unsatisfied, that the 
spirit ascends, seeking a higher object : It is through the 
gush of our human tenderness that the immortal and the in- 
finite in us reveals itself Never does a man know the force 
that is in him till some mighty afiection or grief has human- 
ized the soul. It is by an earthly relationship that God has 
typified to us and helped us to conceive the only true espous- 
al — the marriage of the soul to her eternal Lord. 

It was the glory of Christianity to pronounce all these hu- 
man feelinors sacred; therefore it is that the Church asserts 



402 The First Miracle, 

their sacredness in a religious ceremony ; for example, that 
of marriage. Do not mistake. It is not the ceremony that 
makes a thing religious : a ceremony can only declare a thing 
religious. The Church can not make sacred that which is 
not sacred : she is but here on earth as the moon, the witness 
of the light in heaven ; by her ceremonies and by her insti- 
tutions to bear witness to eternal truths. She can not by 
her manipulations manufacture a child of the devil, througa 
baptism, into a child of God : she can only authoritatively 
declare the sublime truth — ho is not the devil's child, but 
God's child by right. She can not make the bond of mar- 
riage sacred and indissoluble : she can only witness to the 
sacredness of that which the union of two spirits has already 
made : and such are her own words. Her minister is com- 
manded by her to say — " Forasmuch as these two persons 
have consented together^'' there is the sacred fact of nature, 
" I pronounce that they be man and wife " — here is the au- 
thoritative witness to the fact. 

Again, it was His glory to declare the sacredness of all 
natural enjoyments. It was not a marriage only, but a mar- 
riage;/ea5^, to which Christ conducted His disciples. Now 
we can not get over this plain fact by saying that it was a 
religious ceremony : that would be mere sophistry. It was 
an indulgence in the festivity of life \ as plainly as words 
can describe, here was a banquet of human enjoyment. The 
very language of the master of the feast about men who had 
well drunk, tells us that there had been, not excess of course, 
but happiness there and merry-making. 

Neither can we explain away the lesson by saying that it 
is no example to us, for Christ was there to do good, and 
that what was safe for Him might be unsafe for us. For if 
His life is no pattern for us here in this case of accepting an 
invitation, in what can we be sure it is a pattern ? Besides, 
He took His disciples there, and His mother was there : they 
were not shielded, as He was, by immaculate purity. He was 
there as a guest at first, as Messiah only afterwards : thereby 
He declared the sacredness of natural enjoyments. 

Here again, then, Christ manifested His peculiar glory. 
The temptation of the wilderness was past : the baptism of 
John, and the life of abstinence to which it introduced, were 
over; and now the Bridegroom comes before the world in 
the true glory of Messiah — not in the life of asceticism, but 
in the life of Godliness — not separating from life, but conse- 
crating it ; carrying a Divine spirit into every simplest act — ■ 
accepting an invitation to a feast — giving to water the vir- 
tue of a nobler beverage. For Christianity does not destroy 



The Glory of the Divine Son, 403 

what is natural, but ennobles it. To turn water into wine, 
and what is common into what is holy, is indeed the glory of 
Christianity. 

The ascetic life of abstinence, of fasting, austerity, singu- 
larity, is the lower and earthlier form of religion. The life 
of Godliness is the glory of Christ. It is a thing far more 
striking to the vulgar imagination to be religious after the 
type and pattern of John the Baptist, to fast, to mortify 
every inclination, to be found at no feast, to wrap ourselves 
in solitariness, and abstain from all social joys : yes, and far 
easier so to live, and far easier so to win a character for re^ 
ligiousness. A silent man is easily reputed wise. A man 
who suffers none to see him in the common jostle and un- 
dress of life, easily gathers round him a mysterious veil of 
unknown sanctity, and men honor him for a saint. The un- 
known is always wonderful. But the life of Him whom 
men called " a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of 
publicans and sinners," was a far harder and a far heavenlier 
religion. 

To shroud ourselves in no false mist of holiness : to dare to 
show ourselves as we are, making no solemn affectation of 
reserve or difference from others: to be found at the mar- 
riage-feast : to accept the invitation of the rich Pharisee Si- 
mon, and the scorned publican Zaccheus: to mix with the 
crowd of men, using no affected singularity, content to be 
" creatures not too bright or good for human nature's daily 
food :" and yet for a man amidst it all to remain a conse- 
crated spirit, his trials and his solitariness known only to his 
Father — a being set apart, not of this world, alone in the 
heart's deeps with God : to put the cup of this world's glad- 
ness to his lips, and yet be unintoxicated: to gaze steadily 
on all its grandeur, and yet be undazzled, plain and simple 
in personal desires : to feel its brightness, and yet defy its 
thrall : — this is the difficult, and rare, and glorious life of 
God in the soul of man. This, this was the peculiar glory 
of the life of Christ, which was manifested in that first mir* 
acle which Jesus wrought at the marriage-feast in Cana of 
Galilee, 



404 ^^^ Good Shepherd, 



XIX. 
THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 

" I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine, 
As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father : and I lay down mj 
life for the sheep." — John x. 14, 15. 

As these words stand in the English translation, it is hard 
to see any connection between the thoughts that are brought 
together. 

It is asserted that Christ is the good Shepherd, and knows 
His sheep. It is also asserted that He knows the Father ; 
but between these two truths there is no express connection. 
And again, it is declared that He lays down His life for the 
sheep. This follows directly after the assertion that He 
knows the Father. Again, we are at a loss to say what one 
of these truths has to do with the other. 

But the whole difficulty vanishes with the alteration of a 
single stop and a single word. Let the words " even so" be 
exchanged for the word " and." Four times in these verses 
the same word occurs. Three times out of these four it is 
translated " and," — and know my sheep, and am known, and 
I lay down my life. All that is required then is, that in con- 
sistency it shall be translated by the same word in the fourth 
case : for " even so " substitute " and :" then strike away the 
full stop after " mine," and read the whole sentence thus : 
*'I am the good Shepherd, and know my sheep, and am 
known of mine as the Father knoweth me, and^ I know the 
Father : and I lay down my life for the sheep." 

At once our Redeemer's thought becomes clear. There is 
a reciprocal affection between the Shepherd and the sheep. 
There is a reciprocal affection between the Father and the 
Son ; and the one is the parallel of the other. The affection 
between the Divine Shepherd and His flock can be compared, 
for the closeness of its intimacy, with nothing but the affec- 
tion between the Eternal Father and the Son of His love. 
As the Father knows the Son, so does the Shepherd know 
the sheep : as the Son knows the Father, so do the sheep 
know their heavenly Shepherd. 

I. The pastoral character claimed by Christ. 
n. The proofs which substantiate the claim. 

L The Son of Man claims to Himself the name of Shep 



The Good Shepherd, 405 

herd. Now we shall not learn any thing from that, unless 
we enter humbly and affectionatelj^ into the spirit of Christ's 
teaching. It is the heart alone which can give us a key to 
His words. Recollect how He taught. By metaphors, by 
images, by illustrations, boldly figurative, in rich variety — 
yes, in daring abundance. He calls Himself a gate, a king, 
a vine, a shepherd, a thief in the night. In every one of 
these He appeals to certain feelings and associations. What 
He says can only be interpreted by such associations. They 
must be understood by a living heart : a cold, clear intellect 
will make nothing of them. If you take those glorious ex- 
pressions, pregnant with almost boundless thought, and lay 
them down as so many articles of rigid, stiff theology, you 
turn life into death. It is just as if a chemist were to ana- 
lyze a fruit or a flower, and then imagine that he had told 
you what a fruit and a flower are. He separates them into 
their elements, names them and numbers them : but those 
elements, weighed, measured, numbered in the exact propor- 
tions that made up the beautiful living thing, are not the liv- 
ing thing — no, nor any thing like it. Your science is very 
profound, no doubt ; but the fruit is crushed, and the grace 
of the flower is gone. 

It is in this way often that we deal with the words of 
Christ, when we anatomize them and analyze them. Theol- 
ogy is very necessary, chemistry is very necessary ; but 
chemistry destroys life to analyze, murders to dissect ; and 
theology very often kills religion out of words before it can 
cut them up into propositions. 

Here is a living truth which our cold reasonings have often 
torn into dead fragments — "I am the good Shepherd." In 
this northern England it is hard to get the living associa- 
tions of the East with which such an expression is full. 

The pastoral life and duty in the East is very unlike that 
of the shepherds on our bleak hill-sides and downs. Here 
the connection between the shepherd and the sheep is simply 
one of pecuniary interest. Ask an English shepherd about 
his flock, he can tell you the numbers and the value ; he 
knows the market in which each was purchased, and the re- 
munerating price at Avhich it can be disposed of There is 
before him so much stock convertible into so much money. 

Beneath the burning skies and the clear starry nights of 
Palestine there grows up between the shepherd and his flock 
an union of attachment and tenderness. It is the country 
where at any moment sheep are liable to be swept away by 
some mountain-torrent, or carried off by hill-robbers, or torn 
by wolves. At any moment their protector may have to 



4o6 The Good Shepherd, 

save them by personal hazard. The shepherd-king tells U8 
how, in defense of his father's flock, he slew a lion and a 
bear : and Jacob reminds Laban how, when he watched La- 
ban's sheep in the day, the drought consumed. Every hour 
of the shepherd's life is risk. Sometimes for the sake of an 
armful of grass in the parched summer days, he must climb 
precipices almost perpendicular, and stand on a narrow ledge 
of rock where the wild goat will scarcely venture. Pitiless 
showers, driving snows, long hours of thirst — all this he must 
endure, if the flock is to be kept at all. 

And thus there grows up between the man and the dumb 
creatures he protects, a kind of friendship. For this is, after 
all, the true school in which love is taught — dangers mutually 
shared and hardships borne together; these are the things 
which make generous friendship — risk cheerfully encountered 
for another's sake. You love those for whom you risk, and 
they love you; therefore it is that, not as here where the 
flock is driven, the shepherd goes before and the sheep follow 
him. They follow in perfect trust, even though he should be 
leading them away from a green pasture, by a rocky road, to 
another pasture which they can not yet see. He knows them 
all — their separate histories, their ailments, their characters. 

Now let it be observed how much in all this connection 
there is of heart — of real, personal attachment, almost incon- 
ceivable to us. It is strange how deep the sympathy may 
become between the higher and the lower being : nay, even 
between the being that has life and what is lifeless. Alone 
almost in the desert, the Arab and his horse are oner family. 
Alone in those vast solitudes, with no human being near, the 
shepherd and the sheep feel a life in common. Differences 
disappear, the vast interval between the man and the brute : 
the single point of union is felt strongly. One is the love of 
the protector : the other the love of the grateful life : and so 
between lives so distant there is woven by night and day, by 
summer suns and winter frosts, a living network of sympa- 
thy. The greater and the less mingle their being together : 
they feel each other. " The shepherd knows his sheep, and 
is known of them." 

The men to whom Christ said these words felt all this 
and more, the moment He had said them, which it has taken 
me many minutes to draw out in dull sentences : for He ap- 
pealed to the familiar associations of their daily life, and call- 
mg Himself a Shepherd, touched strings Avhich Avould vi- 
brate with many a tender and pure recollection of their 
childhood. And unless Ave try, by realizing such scenes, to 
supply what they felt by association, the words of Chrisi^ 



The Good Shepherd, 407 

will be only hard, dry, lifeless words to us : for all Christ's 
teaching is a Divine poetry, luxuriant in metaphor, over- 
flowing with truth too large for accurate sentences, truth 
which only a heart alive can appreciate. More than half the 
heresies into which Christian sects have blundered, have 
merely come from mistaking for dull prose what prophets 
and apostles said in those highest moments of the soul, when 
seraphim kindle the sentences of the pen and lip into poetry. 
" This is my body." Chill that into prose, and it becomes 
Transubstantiation. "I am the good Shepherd." In the 
dry and merciless logic of a commentary, trying laboriously 
to find out minute points of ingenious resemblance in which 
Christ is like a Shepherd, the glory and the tenderness of this 
sentence are dried up. 

But try to feel, by imagining what the lonely Syrian shep- 
herd must feel towards the helpless things which are the com- 
panions of his daily life, for whose safety he stands in jeopardy 
every hour, and whose value is measurable to him not by 
price, but by his own jeopardy, and then we have reached 
some notion of the love which Jesus meant to represent, that 
eternal tenderness which bends over us — infinitely lower 
though we be in nature — and knows the name of each and 
the trials of each, and thrnks for each with a separate solici- 
tude, and gave Itself for each with a sacrifice as special and 
a love as personal, as if in the whole world's wilderness there 
were none other but that one. 

To the name Shepherd, Christ adds an emphatic word 
of much significance: "I am the good Shepherd." Good, 
not in the sense of benevolent, but in the sense of genuine, 
true born, of the real kind — just as wine of nobler quality is 
good compared with the cheaper sort, just as a soldier is 
good or noble who is a soldier in heart, and not a soldier by 
mere profession or for pay. It is the same word used by St. 
Paul when he speaks of a good, ^. e., a noble soldier of Christ. 
Certain peculiar qualifications make the genuine soldier — 
certain peculiar qualifications make the genuine or good 
shepherd. 

Now this expression distinguishes the shepherd from two 
sorts of men who may also be keepers of the sheep : shep- 
herds, but not shepherds of the true blood. 1. From rob- 
bers. 2. From hirelings. 

1. Robbers may turn shepherds : they may keep the 
sheep, but they guard them only for their own purposes, 
simply for the flesh and fleece ; they have not a true shep- 
herd's heart, any more than a pirate has the true sailor's 
heart and the true sailor's loyalty. There were many such 



4o8 The Good Shepherd. 

marauders on the hills of Galilee and Judea : such, for ex- 
ample, as those from whom David and his band protected 
J^abaPs flocks on Mount Carmel. 

And many such nominal shepherds had the people of 
Israel had in by-gone years : rulers in whom the art of rul- 
ing had been but kingcraft ; teachers whose instruction to 
the people had been but priestcraft. Government, states- 
manship, teachership — these are pastoral callings — sublime, 
even Godlike. For only consider it : wise rule, chivalrous 
protection, loving guidance — what diviner work than these 
has the Master given to the shepherds of the people ? But 
when the work is done, even well done, whether it be by 
statesmen or by pastors, for the sake of party or place, or 
honor, or personal consistency, or preferment, it is not the 
spirit of the genuine shepherd, but of the robber. No won- 
der He said, "All that ever came before Me were thieves 
and robbers." 

2. Hirelings are shepherds, but not good shepherds, of 
the right pure kind : they are tested by danger. "" He that 
is a hireling, and not the good shepherd, whose own the 
sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, 
and fleeth ; and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth 
the sheep." Now a man is a hireling when he does his 
duty for pay. He may do it in his way faithfully. The 
paid shepherd would not desert the sheep for a shower or a 
cold night. But the lion and the bear — he is not paid to 
risk his life against them, and the sheep are not his, so he 
leaves them to their fate. So, in the same way, a man may 
be a hired priest, as Demetrius was at Ephesus : " By this 
craft we get our living." Or a paid demagogue, a great 
champion of rights, and an investigator of abuses — paid by 
applause ; and while popularity lasts he will be a reformer 
— deserting the people when danger comes. There is no 
vital union between the champion and the defenseless — the 
teacher and the taught. The cause of the sheep is not his 
cause. 

Exactly the reverse of this Christ asserts in calling Him- 
self the good Shepherd. He is a good, genuine, or true- 
born sailor who feels that the ship is as it were his own ; 
whose point of chivalrous honor is to save his ship rather 
than himself — not to survive her. He is a good, genuine, or 
true-born shepherd who has the spirit of his calling, is an en- 
thusiast in it, has the true shepherd's heart, and makes the 
cause of the sheep his cause. 

Brethren, the cause of man was the cause of Christ ! He 
did no hireling's work. The only pay He got was hatred, a 



The Good Shepherd, 409 

crown of thorns, and the cross. He might have escaped it 
all. He might have been the Leader of the people and their 
King. He might have converted the idolatry of an hour 
into the hosannas of a lifetime : if He would but have con- 
ciliated the Pharisees, instead of bidding them defiance and 
exasperating their bigotry against Him : if He would but 
have explained, and, like some demagogue called to account, 
trimmed away His sublime sharp-edged truths about oppres- 
sion and injustice until they became harmless, because mean- 
ingless : if He would but have left unsaid those rough things 
about the consecrated temple and the sabbath-days : if He 
would but have left undisputed the hereditary title of Israel 
to God's favor, and not stung the national vanity by telling 
them that trust in God justifies the Gentile as entirely as the 
Jew : if He would but have taught less prominently that 
hateful doctrine of the salvability of the heathen Gentiles 
and the heretic Samaritans, and the universal Fatherhood of 
God : if he would but have stated with less angularity of 
edge His central truth — that not by mere compliance with 
law, but by a spirit transcending law, even the spirit of the 
cross and self-sacrifice, can the soul of man be atoned to 
God: — that would have saved Him. But that would have 
been the desertion of the cause — God's cause and man's — the 
cause of the ignorant defenseless sheep, whose very salvation, 
depended on the keeping of that Gospel intact : therefore the 
Shepherd gave His life a witness to the truth, and a sacrifice 
to God. It was a profound truth that the populace gave ut- 
terance to, when they taunted Him on the cross : " He saved 
others. Himself He can not save." No, of course not ; He 
that will save others can not save Himself 

Of that pastoral character He gives here three proofs. I 
know My sheep — am known of Mine — I lay down My life 
for the sheep. 

I know my sheep, as the Father knoweth Me. In other 
words, as unerringly as His Father read His Leart, so unerr- 
ingly did He read the heart of man and recognize His own. 

Ask we how ? An easy reply, and a common one, would 
be — He recognized them by the Godhead in Him : His mind 
was Divine, therefore omniscient : He knew all things, there- 
fore He knew what was in man : and therefore He knew His 
own. But we must not slur over His precious words in this 
way. That Divinity of His is made the pass-key by which 
we open all mysteries with fatal facility, and save ourselves 
from thinking of them. We get a dogma ard cover truth 
with it : we satisfy ourselves with saying Christ was God, 
and lose tlie precious humanities of His heart and life. 



4IO The Good Shepherd. 

There is here a deep truth of human nature, for he does not 
limit that recognizing power to Himself — He says that the 
sheep know Him as truly as He the sheep. He knew men on 
the same principle on which we know men — the same on 
which we know Him. The only difference is in degree : He 
knows with infinitely more unerringness than we, but the 
knowledge is the same in kind. 

Let us think of this. There is a certain mysterious tact 
of sympathy and antipathy by which we discover the like 
and unlike of ourselves in others' character. You can not 
find out a man's opinions unless he chooses to express them; 
but his feelings and his character you may. He can not hide 
them : you feel them in his look and mein, and tones and 
motion. There is, for instance, a certain something in sincer- 
ity and reality which can not be mistaken — a certain some- 
thing in real grief which the most artistic counterfeit can not 
imitate. It is distinguished by nature, not education. 
There is a something in an impure heart which purity de- 
tects afar off. Marvellous it is how innocence perceives the 
approach of evil which it can not know by experience, just 
as the dove which has never seen a falcon trembles by in- 
stinct at its approach ; just as a blind man detects by finer 
sensitiveness the passing of the cloud which he can not see 
overshadowing the sun. It is wondrous how the truer we 
become the more unerringly we know the ring of truth, dis- 
cern whether a man be true or not, and can fasten at once 
upon the rising lie in word and look, and dissembling act. 
Wondrous how the charity of Christ in the heart finely per- 
ceives the slightest aberration from charity in others, in un- 
gentle thought or slanderous tone. 

Therefore Christ knew His sheep by that mystic power al- 
ways finest in the best natures, most developed in the high- 
est, by which like detects what is like and what unlike it- 
self. He was perfect love, perfect truth, perfect purity : 
therefore He knew what was in man, and felt, as by another 
sense, afar off the shadows of unlovingness, and falseness, and 
impurity. 

No one can have read the Gospels without remarking that 
they ascribe to Him unerring skill in reading man. People, 
we read, began to show enthusiasm for Him. But Jesus did 
not trust Himself unto them, "for He knew what was in 
man." He knew that the flatterers of to-day would be the 
accusers of to-morrow. Nathanael stood before Him. He 
had scarcely spoken a word ; but at once unhesitatingly, to 
Nathanael's own astonishment — " Behold an Israelite indeed, 
ip whom there is no guile !" There came to Him a yo^ng 



The Good Shepherd, 411 

man with vast possessions : a single sentence, an exaggerated 
epithet, an excited manner, revealed his character. Enthusi- 
astic and amiable, Jesus loved him : capable of obedience, in 
life's sunshine and prosperity, ay, and capable of aspiration 
after something more than mere obedience, but not of sacri- 
fice. Jesus tested him to the quick, and the young man fail- 
ed. He did not try to call him back, for He knew what was 
in him and what was not. He read through Zaccheus when 
he climbed into the sycamore-tree, despised by the people as 
a publican, really a son of Abraham: through Judas, with 
his benevolent saying about the selling of the alabaster-box 
for the poor, and his false kiss: through the curses of the 
thief upon the cross, a faith that could be saved : through the 
zeal of, a man who in a fit of enthusiasm offered to go with 
Him whithersoever He would. He read through the Phari- 
sees, and His whole being shuddered with the recoil of utter 
and irreconcilable aversion. 

It w^as as if His bosom was some mysterious mirror on 
which all that came near Him left a sullied or unsullied sur- 
face, detecting themselves by every breath. 

Now distinguish that Divine power from that cunning 
sagacity which men call knowingness in the matter of char- 
acter. The worldly-wise have maxims and rules ; but the 
finer shades and delicacies of truth of character escape 
them. They would prudently avoid Zaccheus — a publican : 
they— 

There is a very solemn aspect in which this power of Jesus 
to know man presents itself. It is this which qualifies Him 
for judgment — this perfection of human sympathy. Perfect 
sympathy with every most delicate line of good implies ex- 
quisite antipathy to every shadow of a shade of evil. God 
hath given Him authority to execute judgment also, because 
He is the Son of Man. On sympathy the final awards of 
heaven and hell are built : attraction and repulsion, the law 
of the magnet. To each pole all that has affinity with itself: 
to Christ all that is Christlike : from Christ all that is not 
Christlike — forever and forever. Eternal judgment is noth- 
ing more than the carrying out of these words, " I know my 
Bheep :" — for the obverse of them is, " I never knew you^ de- 
part from me all ye that work iniquity." 

The second proof which Christ alleges of the genuineness 
of His pastorate is that His sheep know Him. 

How shall we recognize truth Divine? What is the test 
by which we shall know whether it comes from God or not ? 
They tell us we know Christ to be from God because He 
wrought miracles \ we know a doctrine to be from God be* 



4 1 2 The Good Shepherd. 

cause we find it written: or because it is sustained by an 
universal consent of fathers. 

That is — for observe what this argument implies — there is 
something more evident than truth : Truth can not prove it- 
self: we want something else to prove it. Our souls judge 
of truth — our senses judge of miracles ; and the evidence of 
our senses — the lowest part of our nature — is more certain 
than the evidence of our souls, by which we must partake of 
God. 

IsTow to say so is to say that you can not be sure that it is 
midday or morning sunshine unless you look at the sun-dial : 
you can not be sure that the sun is shining in the heavens 
unless you see his shadow on the dial-plate. The dial is val- 
uable to a man who never reads the heavens — the shadow is 
good for him who has not watched the sun : but for a man 
who lives in perpetual contemplation of the sun in heaven, 
the sunshine needs no evidence, and every hour is knowm. 

Now Christ says, " My sheep know Jfe." Wisdom is just- 
ified by her children. Not by some lengthened investiga- 
tion, whether the shepherd's dress be the identical dress, and 
the staff and the crozier genuine, do the sheep recognize the 
shepherd. They know him^ they hear his voice, they know 
him as a man knows his friend. 

They know him, in short, instinctively. Just so does the 
soul recognize what is of God and true. Truth is like light : 
visible in itself, not distinguished by the shadows that it 
casts. There is a something in our souls of God, w^hich cor- 
responds with what is of God outside us, and recognizes it 
by direct intuition : something in the true soul which corre- 
sponds with truth and knoAvs it to be truth. Christ came 
with truth, and the true recognize it as true : the sheep know 
the shepherd, W' anting no further evidence. Take a few ex- 
amples : " God is Love." " What shall a man give in ex- 
change for his soul ?" " He that saveth his life shall lose it : 
and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." "All 
things are possible to him that believeth." "The sabbath 
was made for man, not man for the sabbath." " God is a 
Spirit." 

Now the wise men of intellect and logical acumen wanted 
proof of these truths. Give us, said they, your credentials. 
" By what authority doesfc thou these things ?" They want- 
ed a sign from heaven to prove that the truth was true, and 
the life He led. Godlike, and not devil-like. How can we be 
sure that it is not from Beelzebub, the prince of the devils, 
that these deeds and sayings come ? We must be quite sure 
that we aro not takins^ a messasje from hell as one from 



The Good Shepherd, 413 

heaven. Give us demonstration, chains of evidence — chapter 
and verse — authority. 

But simple men had decided the matter already. They 
knew very little of antiquity, church authority, and shadows 
of coming events which prophecy casts before : but their 
eyes saw the light, and their hearts felt the present God. 
Wise Pharisees and learned doctors said, to account for a 
wondrous miracle, " Give God the glory." But the poor UU' 
lettered man, whose blinded eye had for the first time looked 
on a face of love, replied, " Whether this man be a sinner or 
not, I know not : one thing I know, that whereas I was blind, 
now I see." 

The well-read Jews could not settle the literary question, 
whether the marks of his appearance coincided with the 
prophecies. But the Samaritans /e/^ the life of God: "Now 
we believe, not because of thy word, but because we have 
heard Him ourselves and know that this is indeed the Christ." 

The Shepherd had come, and the sheep knew his voice. 
Brethren, in all matters of eternal truth, the soul is before 
the intellect: the things of God are spiritually discerned. 
You know truth by being true : you recognize God by being 
like Him. The Scribe comes and says, I will prove to you 
that this is sound doctrine by chapter and verse, by what 
the old and best writers say, by evidence such as convinces 
the intellect of an intelligent lawyer or juryman. Think you 
the conviction of faith is got in that way ? 

Christ did not teach like the Scribes. He spoke His truth. 
He said, " If any man believe not, I judge him not ; the 
word which I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the 
last day." It was true, and the guilt of disbelieving it was 
not an error of the intellect but a sin of the heart. Let us 
stand upright: let us be sure that the test of truth is the soul 
within us. Not at second-hand can we have assurance of 
what is divine and what is not: only at first-hand. The 
sheep of Christ hear His voice. 

The third proof given by Christ was pastoral fidelity : " I 
lay down my life for the sheep." Now here is the doctrine 
of vicarious sacrifice: the sacrifice of one instead of another; 
life saved by the sacrifice of another life. 

Most of us know the meagre explanation of these words 
which satisfies the Unitarians : they say that Christ merely 
died as a martyr, in attestation of the truths He taught. 

But you will observe the strength of the expression which 
we can not explain away, "I lay down my life for," i. e, in- 
stead of " the sheep." If the Shepherd had not sacrificed 
Himself, the sheep must have been the sacrifice. 



4 1 4 The Good Shepherd. 

Observe, however, the suffering of Christ was not the sama 
suffering as that from which He saved us. The suffering of 
Christ was death. But the suffering from which He re* 
deemed us by death was more terrible than death. The pit 
into which He descended was the grave. But the pit in 
which we should have been lost forever, was the pit of self- 
ishness and despair. 

Therefore St. Paul affirms, " If Christ be not risen, ye are 
vet in your sinsP If Christ's resurrection be a dream, and 
lie be not risen from the grave of death, you are yet in the 
grave of guilt. He bore suffering to free us from what is 
worse than suffering — sin: temporal death to save us from 
death everlasting : His life given as an offering for sin to 
save the soul's eternal life. 

N"ow in the text this sacrificing love of Christ is paralleled 
by the love of the Father to tlie Son. As He loved the 
sheep, so the Father had loved Him. Therefore the sacrifice 
of Christ is but a mirror of the love of God. The love of the 
Father to the Son is self-sacrificing love. 

You know that shallow men make themselves merry with 
this doctrine. The sacrifice of God, they say, is a figment and 
an impossibility. Nevertheless this parallel tells us that it 
is one of the deepest truths of all the universe. It is the pro- 
found truth which the ancient fathers endeavored to express 
in the doctrine of the Trinity. For what is the love of the 
Father to the Son — Himself yet not Himself— but the grand 
truth of Eternal Love losing Itself and finding Itself again in 
the being of another ? What is it but the sublime express- 
ion of the unselfishness of God ? 

It is a profound, glorious truth ; I wish I knew how to put 
it in intelligible words. But if these words of Christ do not 
make it intelligible to the heart, how can any words of mine? 
The life of blessedness — the life of love — the life of sacrifice 
— the life of God, are identical. All love is sacrifice — the 
giving of life and self for others. God's life is sacrifice — for 
the Father loves the Son as the Son loves the sheep for 
whom He gave His life. 

Whoever will humbly ponder upon this will, I think, un- 
derstand the Atonement better than all theology can teach 
him. Oh, my brethren, leave men to quarrel as they will 
about the theology of the Atonement ; here in these words is 
the religion of it — the blessed, all-satisfying religion for our 
hearts. The self-sacrifice of Christ was the satisfaction to 
the Father. 

How could the Father be satisfied with the dcatli of Christ, 
unless He saw in the sacrifice mirrored His own love? — for 



The Doubt of TJiomas, 4 1 5 

God can be satisfied only with that which is perfect as Him- 
self. Agony does not satisfy God^agony only satisfied Mo- 
loch. Nothing satisfies God but the voluntary sacrifice of 
love. 

The pain of Christ gave God no pleasure — only the love 
that was tested by pain — the love of perfect obedience. He 
was obedient unto death. 



XX. 
THE DOUBT OF THOMAS. 



"Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast 
beHeved: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." — 
John XX. 29. 

The day on which these words were spoken was the first 
day of the week. On that day Thomas received demonstra- 
tioi- that his Lord was risen from the dead. On that same 
day a week before, Thomas had declared that no testimony 
of others, no eyesight of his own, nothing short of touching 
with his hands the crucifixion marks in his Master's body, 
should induce him to believe a fact so unnatural as the res- 
urrection of a human being from the grave. Those seven 
days between must therefore have been spent in a state of 
miserable uncertainty. How miserable and how restless 
none can understand but those who have felt the wretched- 
ness of earnest doubt. 

Doubt moreover, observe, respecting all that is dear to a 
Christian's hopes. For if Christ were not risen, Christianity 
was false, and every high aspiration which it promised to 
gratify was thrown back on the disappointed heart. 

Let us try to understand the doubt of Thomas. There are 
some men whose afiections are stronger than their under- 
standings : they feel more than they think. They are simple, 
trustful, able to repose implicitly on what is told them — lia- 
ble sometimes to verge upon credulity and superstition, but 
take them all in all, perhaps the happiest class of minds : for 
it is happy to be without misgivings about the love of God 
and our own eternal rest in Him. " Blessed," said Christ to 
Thomas, " are they that have believed." 

There is another class of men whose reflective powers are 
stronger than their susceptive: they think out truth — they 
do not feel it out. Often highly gifted and powerful minds, 



4 1 6 The Doubt of Thomas. 

they can not rest till they have made all their grounds r;er« 
tain : they do not feel safe as long as there is one possibility 
of delusion left : they prove all things. Such a man waa 
Thomas. He has well been called the rationalist among the 
apostles. Happy such men can not be. An anxious and in' 
quiring mind dooms its possessor to unrest. But men of 
generous spirit, manly and aifectionate, they may be : Thomas 
was. When Christ was bent on going to Jerusalem, to cer- 
tain death, Thomas said, " Let us go up too, that we may die 
with him." And men of mighty faith they may become, if 
they are true to themselves and their convictions : Thomas 
did. When such men do believe, it is belief with all the heart 
and soul for life. When a subject has been once thoroughly 
and suspiciously investigated, and settled once for all, the ad' 
herence of the whole reasoning man, if given in at all, is given 
frankly and heartily as Thomas gave it — "My Lord, and my 

Now this question of a resurrection which made Thomas 
restless, is the most anxious that can agitate the mind of man. 
So awful in its importance, and out of Christ so almost des- 
perately dark in its uncertainty, who shall blame an earnest 
man severely if he crave the most indisputable proofs? 

Very clearly Christ did not. Thomas asked of Christ a 
sign : he must put his own hands into the prints. His Mas- 
ter gave him that sign or proof. He said, " Reach hither thy 
hand." He gave it, it is true, with a gentle and delicate 
reproof — but He did give it. Xow from that condescension 
we are reminded of the darkness that hangs round the ques- 
tion of a resurrection, and how excusable it is for a man to 
question earnestly until he has got proof to stand on. For if 
it were not excusable to crave a proof, our Master never 
would have granted one. Resurrection is not one of those 
questions on which you can aiford to wait : it is the question 
of life and death. There are times Avhen it does not weigh 
heavily. When we have some keen pursuit before us : when 
we are young enough to be satisfied to enjoy ourselves — the 
problem does not press itself We are too laden with the 
pressure of the present to care to ask what is coming. But 
at last a time comes when we feel it will be all over soon — 
that much of our time is gone, and the rest swiftly going. 
And let a man be as frivolous as he will at heart, it is a ques- 
tion too solemn to be put aside — Whether he is going down 
into extinction and the blank of everlasting silence or not. 
Whether in those far ages, when the very oak which is to 
form his coffin shall have become fibres of black mould, and 
the church-yard in which he is to lie shall have become per 



The Doubt of Thomas, 4 1 7 

haps unconsecrated ground, and the spades of a generation 
yet unborn shall have exposed his bones, those bones will be 
the last relic in the world to bear record that he once trod 
this green earth, and that life was once dear to him, Thomas, 
or James, or Paul. Or whether that thrilling, loving, think- 
ing something, that he calls hirnselt, has indeed within it an 
indestructible existence which shall still be conscious, when 
every thing else shall have rushed into endless wreck. Oh, 
in the awful earnestness of a question such as that, a specula- 
tion and a peradventure will not do : we must have proof 
The honest doubt of Thomas craves a sign as much as the 
cold doubt of the Sadducee. And a sign shall be mercifully- 
given to the doubt of love which is refused to the doubt of 
indifference. 

This passage presents two lines of thought. 

I. The naturalness of the doubts of Thomas, which partly 
excuses them. 

n. The evidences of the Christian Resurrection. 

I. The naturalness of the doubts of Thomas. 

The first assertion that we make to explain those doubts 
is, that Nature is silent respecting a future life. All that 
reason, all that nature, all that religion, apart from Christ, 
have to show us is something worse than darkness. It is 
the twilight of excruciating uncertainty. There is enough 
in the riddle of this world to show us that there may be a 
life to come ; there is nothing to make it certain that there 
will be one. We crave, as Thomas did, a sign either in the 
height above or in the depth beneath, and the answer seems 
to fall back like ice upon our hearts — " there shall no sign 
be given you." 

It is the uncertainty of twilight. You strain at some- 
thing in the twilight, and just when you are beginning to 
make out its form and color, the light fails you, and your 
eyelids sink down, wet and wearied with the exertion. Just 
so it is when we strain into nature's mysteries, to discern the 
secrets of the great hereafter. Exactly at the moment when 
we think we begin to distinguish something, the light goes 
out and we are left groping in darkness — the darkness of the 
grave. 

Let us forget for a moment that we ever heard of Christ : 
what is there in life or nature to strengthen the guess that 
there is a life to come ? There are hints — there are proba- 
bilities — ther3 is nothing more. Let us examine some of 
those probabilities. 

First, there is an irrepressible longing in our hearts. Wa 
o 



4 1 8 The Doubt of Thomas. 

wish for immortality. The thought of annihilation is horrt* 
ble : even to conceive it is almost impossible. The wish is a 
kind of argument : it is not likely that God would have giv- 
en all men such a feeling, if He had not meant to gratify it. 
Every natural longing has its natural satisfaction. If we 
thirst, God has created liquids to gratify thirst. If we are 
jsusceptible of attachments, there are beings to gratify that 
love. If we thirst for life and love eternal, it is likely that 
there are an eternal life and an eternal love to satisfy that 
craving. 

Likely, I say : more we can not say. A likelihood of an 
immortality of which our passionate yearnings are a pre- 
sumption — nothing higher than a likelihood. And in weary 
moments, when the desire of life is not strong, and in unlov- 
ing moments, there is not even a likelihood. 

Secondly, corroborating this feeling we have the traditions 
of universal belief. There is not a nation perhaps which 
does not in some form or other hold that there is a country 
beyond the grave where the weary are at rest. Now that 
which all men everywhere and in every age have held, it is 
impossible to treat contemptuously. How came it to be 
held by all, if only a delusion ? Here is another probability 
in the universality of belief And yet when you come to es- 
timate this, it is too slender for a proof: it is only a pre- 
sumption. The universal voice of mankind is not infallible. 
It was the universal belief once on the evidence of the 
senses that the earth was stationary : the universal voice 
was wrong. The universal voice might be wrong in the 
matter of a resurrection. It might be only a beautiful and 
fond dream, indulged till hope made itself seem to be a re- 
ality. You can not build upon it. 

Once again : in this strange world of perpetual change, 
we are met by many resemblances to a resurrection. With- 
out much exaggeration we call them resurrections. There 
is the resurrection of the moth from the grave of the chrysa- 
lis. For many ages the sculptured butterfly was the type 
and emblem of immortality. Because it passes into a state 
of torpor or deadness, and because from that it emerges by a 
kind of resurrection — the same, yet not the same — in all the 
radiance of a fresh and beautiful youth, never again to be 
supported by the coarse substance of earth, but destined 
henceforth to nourish its etherealized existence on the nectar 
of the flowers — the ancients saw in that transformation a 
something added to their hopes of immortality. It was 
their beautiful symbol of the soul's indestructibility. 

Again, there is a kind of resurrection when the spring 



The Doubt of Thomas. 4 1 9 

brings vigor and motion back to the frozen pulse of the win- 
ter world. Let any one go into the fields at this spring sea- 
son of the year. Let him mark the busy preparations for 
life which are going on. Life is at work in every emerald 
bud, in the bursting bark of every polished bough, in the 
greening tints of every brown hillside. A month ago every 
thing was as still and cold as the dead silence which chills 
the heart in the highest regions of the glacier solitudes. 
Life is coming back to a dead world. It is a resurrection 
surely ! The return of freshness to the frozen world is not 
less marvellous than the return of sensibility to a heart 
which has ceased to beat. If one has taken place, the other 
is not impossible. 

And yet all this, valuable as it is in the way of suggestive- 
ness, is worth nothing in the way of proof It is worth ev- 
ery thing to the heart, for it strengthens the dim guesses and 
vague intimations which the heart has formed already. It is 
worth nothing to the intellect : for the moment we come to 
argue the matter we find how little there is to rest upon in 
these analogies. They are no real resurrections, after all : 
they only look like resurrections. The chrysalis only seemed 
dead : the tree in winter only seemed to have lost its vitali- 
ty. Show us a butterfly which has been dried and crushed, 
fluttering its brilliant wings next year again — show us a 
tree plucked up by the roots and seasoned by exposure, the 
vital force really killed out, putting forth its leaves again, 
then we should have a real parallel to a resurrection. But 
nature does not show us that. So that all we have got in 
the butterfly and the spring are illustrations exquisitely in 
point after immortality is proved, but in themselves no 
proofs at all. 

Further still. Look at it in another point of view, and it 
is a dark prospect. Human history behind and human his- 
tory before, both give a stern " No," in reply to the question 
— Shall we rise again ? 

Six thousand years of human existence have passed away ; 
countless armies of the dead have set sail from the shores of 
time. No traveller has returned from the still land beyond. 
More than one hundred and fifty generations have done 
their work, and sunk into the dust again, and still there is 
not a voice ; there is not a whisper from the grave to tell us 
whether indeed those myriads are in existence still. Be- 
sides, why should they be ? Talk as you will of the grand- 
eur of man, why should it not be honor enough for him, 
more than enough to satisfy a thing so mean, to ha>e had 
his twenty or his seventy years' life-rent of God's universe ? 



420 The Doubt of Thomas. 

WTiy must such a thing, apart from proof, rise up and claim 
to himself an exclusive immortality ? 

Man's majesty ! man's worth ! the difference between him 
and the elephant or ape is too degradingly small to venture 
much on. That is not all : instead of looking backward, now 
look forward. The wisest thinkers tell us that there are al- 
fi'eady on the globe traces of a demonstration that the human 
race is drawing to its close. Each of the great human fami- 
lies has had its day — its infancy — its manhood — its decline. 
The two last races that have not been tried are on the stage 
of earth doing their work now. There is no other to suc- 
ceed them. Man is but of yesterday, and yet his race is 
well-nigh done. Man is wearing out, as every thing before 
him has been worn out. In a few more centuries the crust 
of earth will be the sepulchre of the race of man, as it has 
been the sepulchre of extinct races of palm-trees, and ferns, 
and gigantic reptiles. The time is near when the bones of 
the last human being will be given to the dust. It is his- 
torically certain that man has quite lately, within a few thou- 
sand years, been called into existence. It is certain that be- 
fore very long the race must be extinct. 

Now look at all this without Christ, and tell us whether 
it be possible to escape such misgivings, and such reason- 
ings as these which rise out of such an aspect of things. 
Man, this thing of yesterday, which sprung out of the eter- 
nal nothingness, why may he not sink, after he has played 
his appointed part, into nothingness again ? You see the 
leaves sinking one by one in autumn, till the heaps below 
are rich with the spoils of a whole year's vegetation. They 
were bright and perfect while they lasted : each leaf a mira- 
cle of beauty and contrivance. There is no resurrection for 
the leaves — why must there be one for man ? 

Go and stand some summer evening by the river side : 
you will see the mayfly sporting out its little hour, in dense 
masses of insect life, darkening the air a few feet above the 
gentle swell of the water. The heat of that very afternoon 
brought them into existence. Every gauze wing is traversed 
by ten thousand fibres which defy the microscope to find a 
flaw in their perfection. The omniscience and the care 
bestowed upon that exquisite anatomy, one would think, can 
not be destined to be wasted in a moment. Yet so it is; 
when the sun has sunk below the trees its little life is done. 
Yesterday it was not : to-morrow it will not be. God has 
bidden it be happy for one evening. It has no right or 
claim to a second, and in the universe that marvellous life 
has appeared once and will appear no more. May not the 



The Doubt of Thomas. 42 1 

race of man sink like the generations of the mayfly? Why 
can not the Creator, so lavish in His resources, afford to an- 
nihilate souls as he anniliilates insects ? 

Would it not almost enhance His glory to believe it ? 

That, brethren, is the question ; and Nature has no reply. 
The fearful secret of sixty centuries has not yet found a 
voice. The whole evidence lies before us. We know what 
the greatest and wisest have had to say in favor of an im- 
mortality ; and w^e know how, after eagerly devouring all 
their arguments, our hearts have sunk back in cold disap- 
pointment, and to every proof as we read, our lips have re- 
plied mournfully, that will not stand. Search through tradi- 
tion, history, the world within you and the world without — 
except in Christ there is not the shadow of a shade of proof 
that man survives the grave. 

I do not wonder that Thomas, with that honest accurate 
mind of his, wishing that the news were true, yet dreading 
lest it should be false, and determined to guard against 
every possible illusion, delusion, and deception, said so strong- 
ly, " Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, 
and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my 
hand into his side, I will not believe." 

n. The Christian proofs of a Resurrection. 

This text tells us of two kinds of proof: The first is the 
evidence of the senses — " Thomas, because thou hast seen me, 
thou hast believed." The other is the evidence of the Spirit 
— "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have be- 
lieved." 

Let us scrutinize the external evidence of Christ's resur- 
rection which those verses furnish. It is a twofold evidence : 
The witness of the Apostle Thomas, who was satisfied with 
the proofs — the witness of St. John, who records the circum- 
stance of his satisfaction. Consider first the witness of St. 
John : try it by ordinary rules. Hearsay evidence, which 
comes second-hand, is suspicious, but St. John's is no distant 
hearsay story. He does not say that he had heard the story 
from Thomas, and that years afterwards, when the circum- 
stances had lost their exact sharp outline, he had penned it 
down, when he was growing old and his memory might be 
failing. St. John was present the whole time. All the 
apostles were there : they all watched the result with eager 
interest. The conditions made by Thomas, without which 
be would not believe, had been made before them all. They 
all heard him say that the demonstration was complete : 
they all saw him touch the wounds : and St. John recorded 



4^2 The Doubt of Thomas, 

what he saw, N"ow a scene like that is one of those solemn 
ones in a man's life which can not be forgotten : it graves it- 
self on the memory. A story told us by another may be un- 
intentionally altered or exaggerated in the repetition ; but a 
spectacle like this, so strange and so solemn, could not be 
forgotten or misinterpreted. St. John could have made no 
mistake. Estimate next the worth of the witness of Thomas : 
try it by the ordinary rules of life. Evidence is worth little 
if it is the evidence of credulity. If you find a man believ- 
ing every new story, and accepting every fresh discovery, so 
called, without scrutiny, you may give him credit for sinceri- 
ty ; you can not rest much upon his judgment : his testimony 
can not go for much. For example, when St. Peter, after his 
escape from prison, knocked at Mark's mother's door, there 
went a maid to open it, who came back scared and startled 
with the tidings that she had seen his angel or spirit. Had 
she gone about afterwards among the believers with that 
tale, that St. Peter w as dead and alive again, it would have 
been worth little. Her fears, her sex, her credulity, all rob- 
bed her testimony of its worth. 

Now the resurrection of Christ does not stand on such a 
footing. There was one man who dreaded the possibility 
of delusion, however credulous the others might be. He re- 
solved beforehand that only one proof should be decisive. 
He would not be contented with seeing Christ : that might 
be a dream: it might be the vision of a disordered fancy. 
He would not be satisfied with the assurance of others. 
The evidence of testimony which he did reject was very 
strong. Ten of his most familiar friends, and certain women, 
gave in their separate and their united testimony ; but 
against all that St. Thomas held out skeptically firm. They 
might have been deceived themselves : they might have been 
trifling with him. The possibilities of mistake were innumer- 
able : the delusions of the best men about what they see are 
incredible. He would trust a thing so infinitely important 
to nothing but his own scrutinizing hand. It might be some 
one personating his Master He would put his hands into 
real wounds, or else hold it unproved. The allegiance which 
was given in so enthusiastically, " My Lord, and my God," 
was given in after, and not before scrutiny. It was the cau- 
tious verdict of an enlightened, suspicious, most earnest, and 
most honest skeptic. 

Try the evidence next by character. Blemished character 
damages evidence. Now the only charge that was ever 
heard against the Apostle John was that he loved a world 
which hated him. The character of the Apostle Thomas is 



The Doubt of Thomas, 423 

that he was a man cautious in receiving evidence, and most 
rigorous in exacting satisfactory proof, but ready to act upon 
his convictions when once made, even to the death. Love, 
elevated aboA''e the common love of man, in the one — heroic 
conscientiousness and a most rare integrity in the other — 
who impeaches that testimony ? 

Once more : any possibility of interested motives will dis- 
credit evidence. Ask we the motive of John or Thomas for 
this strange tale ? John's reward — a long and solitary ban- 
ishment to the mines of Patmos. T^he gain and the bribe 
which tempted Thomas — a lonely pilgrimage to the far East, 
and death at the last in India. Those were strange motives 
to account for their persisting and glorying in the story of 
the resurrection to the last ! Starving their gain, and martyr- 
dom their price. 

The evidence to which Thomas yielded was the evidence 
of the senses — touch, and sight, and hearing. Now the feel- 
ing which arose from this touching, and feeling, and demon- 
stration, Christ pronounced to be faith : " Thomas, because 
thou hast seen, thou hast believed." There are some Chris- 
tian writers who tell us that the conviction produced by the 
intellect or the senses is not faith: but Christ says it is. 
Observe, then, it matters not how faith comes — whether 
through the intellect, as in the case of St. Thomas — or 
through the heart, as in the case of St. John — or as the result 
of long education, as in the case of St. Peter. God has many 
ways of bringing diiferent characters to faith : but that 
blessed thing which the Bible calls faith is a state of soul in 
which the things of God become glorious certainties. It 
was not faith which assured Thomas that what stood before 
him was the Christ he had known : that was sight. But it 
was faith, which from the visible enabled him to pierce up to 
the truth invisible: "My Lord, and my God." And it was 
faith which enabled him through all life after, to venture 
every thing on that conviction, and live for One who had 
died for him. 

Remark again this : The faith of Thomas was not merely 
satisfaction about a fact : it was trust in a person. The 
admission of a fact, however sublime, is not faith: we may 
believe that Christ is risen, yet not be nearer heaven. It is 
a Bible fact that Lazarus rose from the grave, but belief in 
Lazarus's resurrection does not make the soul better than it 
was. Thomas passed on from the fact of the resurrection to 
the person of the risen : " ^ly Lord, and my God." Trust in 
the risen Saviour — that was the belief which saved his soul. 

And that is our salvation too. You may satisfy yourself 



424 The Doubt of Thomas, 

about the evidences of the resurrection ; you may bring in 
your verdict well, like a cautious and enlightened judge; 
you are then in possession of a fact, a most valuable and 
curious fact : but faith of any saving worth you have not, 
unless from the fact you pass on, like Thomas, to cast the 
allegiance and the homage of your soul, and the love of all 
your being, on Him whom Thomas worshipped. It is not 
belief about the Christ, but personal trust in the Christ of 
God, that saves the soul 

There is another kind of evidence by which the resurrec- 
tion becomes certain. Not the evidence of the senses, but 
the evidence of the spirit : " Blessed are they that have not 
seen, and yet have believed." There are thousands of Chris- 
tians who have never examined the evidences of the resur- 
rection piece by piece : they are incapable of estimating it if 
they did examine : they know nothing about the laws of ev- 
idence : they have had no experience in balancing the value 
of testimony : they are neither lawyers nor philosophers : and 
yet these simple Christians have received into their very souls 
the resurrection of their Redeemer, and look forward to 
their own rising from the grave with a trust as firm, as 
steady, and as saving, as if they had themselves put their 
hands into His wounds. They have never seen — they know 
nothing of proofs and miracles — yet they believe, and are 
blessed. How is this ? 

I reply, there is an inward state of heart which makes 
truth credible the moment it is stated. It is credible to 
some men because of what they are. Love is credible to a 
loving heart : purity is credible to a pure mind : life is cred- 
ible to a spirit in which ever life beats strongly : it is incred- 
ible to other men. Because of that such men believe. Of 
course that inward state could not reveal a fact like the 
resurrection ; but it can receive the fact the moment it is 
revealed without requiring evidence. The love of St. John 
himself never could discover a resurrection; but it made 
a resurrection easily believed, when the man of intellect, 
St. Thomas, found difficulties. Therefore " with the heart 
man believeth unto righteousness," and therefore "he that 
believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself," 
and therefore "faith is the substance of things hoped for." 
Now it is of such a state, a state of love and hope, which 
makes the Divine truth credible and natural at once, that 
Jesus speaks : " Blessed are they that have not seen and yet 
have believed." 

There are men in whom the resurrection begun makes the 
resurrection credible. In them the Spiiit of the risen Savioui 



The Doubt of Thomas, 425 

works already ; and they have mounted with Him from the 
grave. They have risen out of the darkness of doubt, and are 
expatiating in the brightness and the sunshine of a day in 
which God is ever light. Their step is as free as if the clay 
of the sepulchre had been shaken off: and their hearts are 
lighter than those of other men ; and there is in them an 
unearthly triumph which they are unable to express. They 
have risen above the narrowness of life, and all that is petty, 
and ungenerous, and mean. They have risen above fear — 
they have risen above self In the New Testament that is 
called the spiritual resurrection, a being, " risen with Christ :" 
and the man in whom all that is working has got something 
more blessed than external evidence to rest upon. He has the 
witness in himself: he has not seen, and yet he has believed : 
he believed in a resurrection, because he has the resurrection 
in himself The resurrection in all its heavenliness and un- 
earthly elevation has begun within his soul, and he knows as 
clearly as if he had demonstration, that it must be developed 
in an eternal life. 

Now this is the higher and nobler kind of faith — a faith 
more blessed than that of Thomas. " Because thou hast seen 
me, thou hast believed." There are times when we envy, as 
possessed of higher privileges, those who saw Christ in the 
flesh : we think that if we could have heard that calm voice, 
or seen that blessed presence, or touched those lacerated 
wounds in His sacred flesh, all doubt would be set at rest 
forever. Therefore these words must be our corrective. 
God has granted us the possibility of believing in a more 
trustful and more generous way than if we saw. To believe, 
not because we are learned and can prove, but because there 
is a something in us, even God's own Spirit, which makes us 
feel Light as light, and Truth as true — that is the blessed 
faith. 

Blessed, because it carries with it spiritual elevation of 
character. Narrow the prospects of man to this time-world, 
and it is impossible to escape the conclusions of the Epicu- 
rean sensualist. If to-morrow Ave die, let us eat and drink 
today. If we die the sinner's death, it becomes a matter of 
mere taste whether we shall live the sinner's life or not. 
But if our existence is forever, then plainly, that which is to 
be daily subdued and subordinated is the animal within us : 
that which is to be cherished is that which is likest God 
within us — which we have from Him, and w^hich is the sole 
pledge of eternal being in the spirit-life. 



426 The Irreparable Past, 



XXI. 
THE IRREPARABLE PAST. 

"And he eometh the third time, and saith unto them, Sleep on now, and 
take your rest : it is enough, the hour is come ; behold, the Son of man is 
betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise up, let us go ; lo, he that betrayeth 
me is at hand." — Mark xiv. 41, 42. 

It is upon two sentences of this passage that our attention 
it to be fixed to-day — sentences which in themselves are ap- 
parently contradictoiy, but which are pregnant with a les- 
son of the deepest practical import. Looked at in the 
mere meaning of the words as they stand, our Lord's first 
command given to His disciples, " Sleep on now, and take 
your rest," is inconsistent with the second command, which 
follows almost in the same breath, " Rise, let us be going." 
A permission to slumber, and a warning to arouse at once, 
are injunctions which can scarcely stand together in the same 
sentence consistently. 

Our first inquiry therefore is, what did our Redeemer 
mean ? We shall arrive at the true solution of this difficulty 
if we review the circumstances under which these words were 
spoken. 

The account with which these verses stand connected, be- 
longs to one of the last scenes in the drama of our Master's 
earthly pilgrimage : it is found in the history of the trial- 
hour which was passed in the garden of Gethsemane. And 
an hour it was indeed big with the destinies of the world, 
for the command had gone forth to seize the Saviour's per- 
son : but the Saviour was still at large and free. Upon the 
success or the frustration of that plan the world's fate was 
trembling. Three men were selected to be witnesses of the 
sufferings of that hour : three men, the favored ones on all 
occasions of the apostolic band, and the single injunction 
which had been laid upon them was, " Watch with me one 
hour." 

That charge to watch or keep awake, seems to have been 
given with two ends in view. He asked them to keep 
awake, first that they might sympathize with him. He com- 
manded them to keep awake that they might be on their 
guard against surprise : that they might aflbrd sympathy, 
because never in all His career did Christ more stand in need 



The Irreparable Past, 427 

of such soothing as it was in the power of man to give. It is 
true that was not much : the struggle, and the agony, and 
the making up of the mind to death had something in them 
too Divine and too mysterious to be understood by the dis- 
ciples, and therefore sympathy could but reach a portion of 
what our Redeemer felt. Yet still it appears to have been 
an additional pang in Christ's anguish to find that He was 
left thoroughly alone — to endure, while even His own friends 
did not compassionate His endurance. We know what a re- 
lief it is to see the honest affectionate face of a menial serv- 
ant, or some poor dependent, regretting that your suffering 
may be infinitely above his comprehension. It may be a se- 
cret which you can not impart to him : or it may be a men- 
tal distress which his mind is too uneducated to appreciate : 
yet still his sympathy in your dark hour is worth a world. 
What you suffer he knows not, but he knows you do suffer, 
and it pains him to think of it : there is balm to you in that. 
This is the power of sympathy. 

We can do little for one another in this world. Little, 
very little, can be done when the worst must come ; but yet 
to know that the pulses of a human heart are vibrating with 
yours, there is something in that, let the distance between 
man and man be ever so immeasurable, exquisitely soothing. 

It was this, and but this, in the way of feeling, that Christ 
asked of Peter, James, and John : Watch — be awake : let me 
not feel that when I agonize you can be at ease and comfort- 
able. But it would seem there was another thing which He 
asked in the way of assistance. The plot to capture Him was 
laid ; the chance of that plot's success lay in making the sur- 
prise so sudden as to cut off all possibility of escape. The 
hope of defeating that plot depended upon the fidelity of 
apostolic vigilance. Humanly speaking, had they been vigi- 
lant they might have saved Him. Breathless listening for 
the sound of footsteps in the distance : eyes anxiously strain- 
ing through the trees to distinguish the glitter of the lan- 
terns ; unremitting apprehension catching from the word of 
Christ an intimation that He was in danger, and so giving 
notice on the first approach of any thing like intrusion — that 
would have been watching. 

That command to watch was given twice — first, when 
Christ first retired aside leaving the disciples by themselves ; 
secondly, in a reproachful way when He returned and found 
His request disregarded. He waked them up once and said, 
"T\niat, could ye not watch with me one hour?" He came 
again, and found their eyes closed once more. On that occa- 
sion not a syllable fell from His lips ; He did not waken 



428 The Irreparable Past 

them a second time. He passed away sad and disappointed, 
and left them to their slumbers. But when He came the 
third time, it was no longer possible for their sleep to do 
Him harm or their watching to do Him good. The precious 
opportunity was lost forever. Sympathy, vigilance, the hour 
for these was past. The priests had succeeded in their sur- 
prise, and Judas had well led them through the dark, with 
unerring accuracy, to the very spot where his Master knelt ; 
and there were seen quite close, the dark figures shown in re- 
lief against the glare of the red torchlight, and every now 
and then the gleam glittering from the bared steel and the 
Roman armor. It was all over, they might sleep as they 
liked, their sleeping could do no injury now ; their watching 
could do no good. And, therefore, partly in bitterness, part- 
ly in reproach, partly in a kind of irony, partly in sad earnest, 
our Master said to His disciples : " Sleep on now : there is no 
use in watching now: take your rest — forever if you will. 
Sleep and rest can do me no more harm now, for all that 
watching might have done is lost." 

But, brethren, we have to observe that in the next sen- 
tence our Redeemer addresses Himself to the consideration 
of what could yet be done : the best thing as circumstances 
then stood. So far as any good to be got from watching 
went, they might sleep on : there was no reparation for th© 
fault that had been done : but so far as duty went, there was 
still much of endurance to which they had to rouse them- 
selves. They could not save their Master, but they might 
loyally and manfully share His disgrace, and, if it must be. 
His death. They could not put off the penalty, but they 
might steel themselves cheerfully to share it. Safety was 
out of the question : but they might meet their fate, instead 
of being overwhelmed by it : and so, as respected what was 
gone by,- Christ said, " Sleep, what is done can not be un- 
done ;" but as respected the duties that were lying before 
them still. He said, " We must make the best of it that can 
be made: rouse yourselves to dare the worst: on to enact 
your parts like men. Rise, let us be going — we have some- 
thing still left to do." Here then we have two subjects of 
contemplation distinctly marked out for us. 

I. The irreparable past. 
n. The available future. 

The words of Christ are not like the words of other men : 
His sentences do not end with the occasion which called them 
forth: every sentence of Christ's is a deep principle of hu- 
man life, and it is so with these sentences : " Sleep on now " 



The Irreparable Past. 429 

— that is a principle. " Rise up, and let us be going " — that 
is another principle. The principle contained in " Sleep on 
now " is this, that the past is irreparable, and after a certain 
moment waking will do no good. You may improve the fu- 
ture, the past is gone beyond recovery. As to all that is 
gone by, so far as the hope of altering it goes, you may sleep 
on and take your rest : there is no power in earth or heaven 
that can undo what has once been done. 

Now let us proceed to give illustrations of this principle. 

It is true, first of all, with respect to time that is gone by. 
Time is the solemn inheritance to which every man is born 
heir, who has a life-rent of this world — a little section cut out 
of eternity and given us to do our work in : an eternity be- 
fore, an eternity behind ; and the small stream between, 
floating swiftly from one into the vast bosom of the other. 
The man who has felt with all his soul the significance of 
Time v\'ill not be long in learning any lesson that this world 
has to teach him. Have you ever felt it, my Christian breth- 
ren ? Have you ever realized how your own little streamlet 
is gliding away, and bearing you along with it towards that 
awful other world of which all things here are but the thin 
shadows, down into that eternity towards which the confused 
wreck of all earthly things are bound ? Let us realize that, 
beloved brethren: until that sensation of Time, and the infi- 
nite meaning which is wrapped up in it, has taken possession 
of our souls, there is no chance of our ever feeling other than 
that it is worse than madness to sleep that time away. Ev- 
ery day in this world has its work ; and every day as it rises 
out of eternity keeps putting to each of us the question 
afresh, What Avill you do before to-day has sunk into eternity 
and nothingness again ? And now what have we to say with 
respect to this strange solemn thing — Time ? That men do 
with it through life just what the apostles did for one precious 
and irreparable hour in the garden of Gethsemane : they go 
to sleep. Have you ever seen those marble statues in some 
public square or garden, which art has so fashioned into a 
perennial fountain that through the lips or through the hands 
the clear water flows in a perpetual stream, on and on for- 
ever ; and the marble stands there — passive, cold — making 
no effort to arrest the gliding water ? 

It is so that Time flows through the hands of men — swift, 
never pausing till it has run itself out ; and there is the man 
petrified into a marble sleep, not feeling what it is which is 
passing away forever. It is so, brethren, just so, that the 
destiny of nine men out of ten accomplishes itself, slipping 
away from them, aimless, useless, till it is too late. And 



430 The Irreparable Past. 

this passage asks us with all the solemn thoughts which 
crowd around an approaching eternity — what has been our 
life, and what do we intend it shall be? Yesterday, last 
week, last year — they are gone. Yesterday, for example, 
was such a day as never was before, and never can be again. 
Out of darkness and eternity it was born a new fresh day : 
into darkness and eternity it sank again forever. It had a 
voice calling to us, of its own. Its own work — its own du- 
ties. What were we doing yesterday? Idling, whiling 
away the time in light and luxurious literature — not as life's 
relaxation, but as life's business ? thrilling our hearts with 
the excitements of life — contriving how to spend the day 
most pleasantly ? Was that our day ? Sleep, brethren ! all 
that is but the sleep of the three apostles. And now let us 
remember this : there is a day coming when that sleep will 
be broken rudely, with a shock : there is a day in our future 
]ives when our time will be counted not by years nor by 
months, nor yet by hours, but by minutes — the day when 
unmistakable symptoms shall announce that the messengers 
of death have come to take us. 

That startling moment w^ll come which it is in vain to at- 
tempt to realize now, w^hen it will be felt that it is all over 
at last — that our chance and our trial are past. The moment 
that we have tried to think of, shrunk from, put away from 
us, here it is — going too, like all other moments that have 
gone before it : and then with eyes unsealed at last, you look 
back on the life which is gone by. There is no mistake about 
it : there it is, a sleep, a most palpable sleep — self-indulged 
unconsciousness of high destinies, and God and Christ : a 
sleep when Christ was calling out to you to watch with Him 
one hour — a sleep when there was something to be done — a 
sleep broken, it may be, once or twice by restless dreams, 
and by a voice of truth which would make itself heard at 
times, but still a sleep which was only rocked into deeper 
stillness by interruption. And now from the undone eterni- 
ty the bosom of whose waves is distinctly audible upon your 
soul, tljere comes the same voice again — a solemn sad voice — 
but no longer the same word, " Watch " — other words alto- 
gether, " You may go to sleep." It is too late to wake ; 
there is no science in earth or heaven to recall time that 
once has fled. 

Again, this principle of the irreparable past holds good 
with respect to preparing for temptation. That hour in the 
garden was a precious opportunity given for laying in spir- 
itual strength. Christ knew it well. He struggled and 
fought then: therefore there was no struggling afterwards— 



The Irreparable Past 431 

no trembling in the judgment-ball — no shrinking on the cross, 
but only dignified and calm victory ; for He had fought the 
temptation on His knees beforehand, and conquered all in the 
garden. The battle of the judgment-hall, the battle of the 
cross, were already fought and over, in the watch and in the 
agony. The apostles missed the meaning of that hour ; and 
therefore when it came to the question of trial, the loudest 
boaster of them all shrunk from acknowledging whose he 
was, and the rest played the part of the craven and the 
renegade. And if the reason of this be asked, it is simply 
this : They went to trial unprepared : they had not prayed : 
and what is a Christian without prayer but Samson with- 
out his talisman of hair? 

Brethren, in this world, when there is any foreseen or sus- 
pected danger before us, it is our duty to forecast our trial. 
It is our wisdom to put on our armor — to consider what lies 
before us — to call up resolution in God's strength to go 
through what we may have to do. And it is marvellous 
how difficulties smooth away before a Christian when he 
does this. Trials that cost him a struggle to meet even in 
imagination — like the heavy sweat of Gethsemane, when 
Christ was looking forward and feeling exceeding sorrowful 
even unto death — come to their crisis ; and behold, to his 
astonishment they are nothing — they have been fought and 
conquered already. But if you go to meet those tempta- 
tions, not as Christ did, but as the apostles did, prayerless, 
trusting to the chance impulse of the moment, you may make 
up your mind to fail. That opportunity lost is irreparable : 
it is your doom to yield then. Those words are true, you 
may " sleep on now, and take your rest," for you have be- 
trayed yourselves into the hands of danger. 

And now one word about prayer. It is a preparation for 
danger, it is the armor for battle. Go not, my Christian 
brother, into the dangerous world without it. You kneel 
down at night to pray, and drowsiness weighs down your 
eyelids. A hard day's work is a kind of excuse, and you 
shorten your prayer and resign yourself softly to repose. 
The morning breaks, and it may be you rise late, and so 
your early devotions are not done, or done with irregular 
haste. No watching unto prayer — wakefulness once more 
omitted. And now we ask, is that reparable? Brethren, 
we solemnly believe not. There has been that done which 
can not be undone. You have given up your prayer, and 
you will suffer for it. Temptation is before you, and you are 
not fit to meet it. There is a guilty feeling on the soul, and 
you linger at a distance from Christ. It is no marvel if that 



432 The Irreparable Past 

day, in which you suffer drowsiness to interfere with prayer, 
be a day on which you betray Him by cowardice and soft 
shrinking from duty. Let it be a principle through life, mo- 
ments of prayer intruded upon by sloth can not be made up. 
We may get experience, but we can not get back the rich 
freshness and the strength which were wrapped up in these 
moments. 

Once again this principle is true in another respect. Op- 
portunities of doing good do not come back. We are here, 
brethren, for a most definite and intelligible purpose — to 
educate our own hearts by deeds of love, and to be the in- 
strument of blessing to our brother men. There are two 
ways in which this is to be done — by guarding them from 
danger, and by soothing them in their rough path by kindly 
sympathies— the two things which the apostles were asked 
to do for Christ. And it is an encouraging thought, that he 
who can not do the one has at least the other in his power. 
If he can not protect he can sympathize. Let the weakest 
— let the humblest in this congregation remember, that in 
his daily course he can, if he will, shed around him almost a 
heaven. Kindly words, sympathizing attentions, watchful- 
ness against wounding men's sensitiveness — these cost very 
little, but they ^re priceless in their value. Are they not, 
brethren, almost the staple of our daily happiness ? From 
hour to hour, from moment to moment, we are supported, 
blest, by small kindnesses. And then consider : Here is a 
section of life, one-third, one-half, it may be three-fourths 
gone by, and the question before us is, how much has been 
done in that way ? Who has charged himself with the 
guardianship of his brother's safety ? Who has laid on him- 
self as a sacred duty to sit beside his brother suffering ? Oh ! 
my brethren, it is the omission of these things which is irrepa- 
rable : irreparable, when you look to the purest enjoyment 
which might have been your own : irreparable, when you 
consider the compunction which belongs to deeds of love 
not done; irreparable, when you look to this groaning world 
and feel that its agony of bloody sweat has been distilling 
all night, and you were dreaming away in luxury ! Shame, 
shame upon our selfishness ! There is an infinite voice in 
the sin and sufferings of earth's millions, which makes every 
idle moment, every moment, that is, which is not relaxation, 
guilt ; and seems to cry out. If you will not bestir yourself 
for love's sake now, it will soon be too late. 

Lastly, this principle applies to a misspent youth. There 
is something very remarkable in the picture which is placed 
before us. There is a picture of One struggling, toiling, 



The Irreparable Past. 433 

standing between others and danger, and those others quiet- 
ly content to reap the benefit of that struggle without anxie- 
ty of their own. And there is something in this singularly 
like the position in which all young persons are placed. 
The young are by God's providence exempted in a great 
measure from anxiety : they are as the apostles were in re- 
lation to their Master: their friends stand between them 
and the struggles of existence. They are not called upon to 
think for themselves : the burden is borne by others. They 
get their bread without knowing or caring how it is paid 
for : they smile and laugh without a suspicion of the anxious 
thoughts of day and night which a parent bears to enable 
them to smile. So to speak they are sleeping — and it is not 
a guilty sleep — while another watches. 

My young brethren — youth is one of the precious oppor- 
tunities of life — rich in blessing if j^ou choose to make it so, 
but having in it the materials of undying remorse if you suf- 
fer it to pass unimproved. Your quiet Gethsemane is now. 
Gethsemane's struggles you can not know yet. Take care 
that you do not learn too well Gethsemane's sleep. Do you 
know how you can imitate the apostles in their fatal sleep ? 
You can suffer your young days to pass idly and uselessly 
away; you can live as if you had nothing to do but to en- 
joy yourselves : you can let others think for you, and not 
try to become thoughtful yourselves : till the business and 
the difficulties of life come upon you unprepared, and you 
find yourselves like men waking from sleep, hurried, con- 
fused, scarcely able to stand, with all the faculties bewilder- 
ed, not knowing right from wrong, led headlong to evil, just 
because you have not given yourselves in time to learn what 
is good. All that is sleep. 

And now let us mark it. You can not repair that in after- 
life. Oh ! remember every period of human life has its own 
lesson, and you can not learn that lesson in the next period. 
The boy has one set of lessons to learn, and the young man 
another, and the grown-up man another. Let us consider 
one single instance. The boy has to learn docility, gentle- 
ness of temper, reverence, submission. All those feelings 
which are to be transferred afterwards in full cultivation to 
God, like plants nursed in a hotbed and then planted out, 
are to be cultivated first in youth. Afterwards, those habits 
which have been merely habits of obedience to an earthly 
parent, are to become religious submission to a heavenly par- 
ent. Our parents stand to us in the place of God. Venera- 
tion for our parents is intended to become afterwards adora- 
tion for something higher, Take that single instance ; and 



434 T^^ Irreparable Past. 

now suppose that that is not learnt in boyhood. Suppose 
that the boy sleeps to that duty of veneration, and learns 
only flippancy, insubordination, and the habit of deceiving 
his father — can that, my young brethren, be repaired after- 
wards? Humanly speaking, not. Life is like the transition 
from class to class in a school. The school-boy who has not 
learnt arithmetic in the earlier classes can not secure it when 
he comes to mechanics in the higher : each section has its 
own sufficient work. He may be a good philosopher or a 
good historian, but a bad arithmetician he remains for life ; 
for he can not lay the foundation at the moment when he 
must be building the superstructure. The regiment which 
has not perfected itself in its manoeuvres on the parade- 
ground can not learn them before the guns of the enemy. 
And just in the same way, the young person who has slept 
his youth away, and become idle, and selfish, and hard, can 
not make up for that afterwards. He may do something, 
he may be religious — yes ; but he can not be what he 
might have been. There is a part of his heart which will 
remain uncultivated to the end. The apostles could share 
their Master's sufierings — they could not save Him. Youth 
has its irreparable past. 

And therefore, my young brethren, let it be impressed 
upon you — NOW is a time, infinite in its value for eternity, 
which will never return again. Sleep not ; learn that there 
is a very solemn work of heart which must be done while the 
stillness of the garden of your Gethsemane gives you time. 
Now — or never. The treasures at your command are infinite. 
Treasures of time, treasures of youth, treasures of opportuni- 
ty that grown-up men would sacrifice every thing they have 
to possess. Oh for ten years of youth back again with the 
added experience of age ! But it can not be : they must be 
content to sleep on now, and take their rest. 

We are to pass on next to a few remarks on the other sen- 
tence in this passage, which brings before us for considera- 
tion the future which is still available : for we are to observe, 
that our Master did not limit His apostles to a regretful rec- 
ollection of their failure. Recollection of it He did demand. 
There were the materials of a most cutting self-reproach in 
the few words He said : for they contained all the desolation 
of that sad word, 7iever. Who knows not what that word 
wraps up — never — it never can be undone. Sleep on. But 
yet there was no sickly lingering over the irreparable. Our 
Master's words are the words of One who had fully recog- 
nized the hopelessness of His position, but yet manfully and 
calmly had numbered His resources and scanned His duties, 



The Irreparable Past. 435 

and then braced up His mind to meet the exigencies of His 
situation with no passive endurance : the moment was come 
for action — " Rise, let us be going." 

Now the broad general lesson which w^e gain from this is 
not hard to read. It is that a Christian is to be forever rous- 
ing himself to recognize the duties which lie before him now. 
In Christ the motto is ever this, " Let us be going." Let me 
speak to the conscience of some one. Perhaps yours is a 
very remorseful past — a foolish, frivolous, disgraceful, frit- 
tered past. Well, Christ says, My servant, be sad, but no 
languor ; there is work to be done for me yet — rise up, be 
going ! Oh my brethren, Christ takes your wretched rem- 
nants of life — the feeble pulses of a heart which has spent its 
best hours not for Him, but for self and for enjoyment, and 
in His strange love He condescends to accept them. 

Let me speak to another kind of experience. Perhaps we 
feel that we have faculties which never have and now never 
will find their right field ; perhaps we are ignorant of many 
things which can not be learnt now ; perhaps the seed-time 
of life has gone by, and certain powders of heart and mind 
will not grow now; perhaps you feel that the best days of 
life are gone, and it is too late to begin things w^hich were in 
your power once : still, my repentant brother, there is encour- 
agement from your Master yet. Wake to the opportunities 
that yet remain. Ten years of life — five years — one year — 
say you have only that — will you sleep that away because 
you have already slept too long ? Eternity is crying out to 
you louder and louder as you near its brink. Rise, be going : 
count your resources : learn what you are not fit for, and 
give up w^ishing for it : learn w^hat you can do, and do it with 
the energy of a man. That is the great lesson of this pas- 
sage. But now consider it a little more closely. 

Christ impressed two things on His apostles' minds : 1. 
The duty of Christian earnestness — " Rise ;" 2. The duty of 
Christian energy — " Let us be going." 

Christ roused them to earnestness when He said, "Rise." 
A short, sharp, rousing call. They were to start up and 
w^ake to the realities of their position. The guards were on 
them: their Master was about to be led away to doom. 
That was an aw^akening w^hich would make men spring to 
their feet in earnest. Brethren, goodness and earnestness are 
nearly the same thing. In the language in which this Bible 
was w^ritten there was one word w^hich expressed them both : 
what we translate a good man, in Greek is literally " ear- 
nest." The Greeks felt that to be earnest w^as nearly iden- 
tical w^th being good. But, however, there is a day in life 



4.3 6 T^i^^ Irreparable Past. 

when a man must be earnest, but it does not follow that he 
will be good. " Behold the bridegroom cometh ; go ye out 
to meet him." That is a sound that will thunder through 
the most fast-locked slumber, and rouse men whom sermons 
can not rouse. But that will not make them holy. Earnest- 
ness of life, brethren, that is goodness. Wake in death you 
ynust^ for it is an earnest thing to die. Shall it be this, I 
pray you ? — Shall it be the voice of death which first says, 
" Arise," at the very moment when it says, " Sleep on for- 
ever?" — Shall it be the bridal train sweeping by, and the 
shutting of the doors, and the discovery that the lamp is 
gone out ? — Shall that be the first time you know that it is 
an earnest thing to live ? Let us feel that we have been do- 
ing : learn what time is — sliding from you, and not stopping 
when you stop : learn what sin is : learn what " never " is : 
"Awake, thou that sleepest." 

Lastly, Christian energy — " Let us be going." There were 
two ways open to Christ in which to submit to His doom. 
He might have waited for it : instead of which He went to 
meet the soldiers. He took up the cross, the cup of anguish 
was not forced between His lips. He took it with His own 
hands, and drained it quickly to the last drop. In after- 
years the disciples understood the lesson, and acted on it. 
They did not wait till persecution overtook them ; they 
braved the Sanhedrim: they fronted the world: they pro- 
claimed aloud the unpopular and unpalatable doctrines of 
the resurrection and the cross. Now in this there lies a prin- 
ciple. Under no conceivable set of circumstances are we 
justified in sitting 

' ' By the poison'd springs of life, 
Waiting for the morrow which shall free us from the strife." 

Under no circumstances, whether of pain, or grief, or disap- 
pointment, or irreparable mistake, can it be true that there is 
not something to be done^ as well as something to be suffered. 
And thus it is that the spirit of Christianity draws over our 
life, not a leaden cloud of remorse and despondency, but a 
sky — not perhaps of radiant, but yet of most serene and.chas- 
tened and manly hope. There is a past which is gone for- 
ever. But there is a future which is still our own. 



SERMONS 



St)trir Smts, 

I. 
THE TONGUE. 

*' Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Be- 
hold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth ! And the tongue is a fire, a 
world of iniquity : so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the 
whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature ; and it is set on fire of 
hell. — St. James iii. 5, 6. 

In the development of Christian truth a peculiar office was 
assigned to the Apostle James. 

It was given to St. Paul to proclaim Christianity as the 
spiritual law of liberty, and to exhibit faith as the most act- 
ive principle within the breast of man. It was St. John's to 
say that the deepest quality in the bosom of Deity is love ; 
and to assert that the life of God in man is love. It was the 
office of St. James to assert the necessity of moral rectitude ; 
his very name marked him out peculiarly for this office : he 
was emphatically called, " the Just :" integrity was his peculiar 
characteristic. A man singularly honest, earnest, real. Ac- 
cordingly, if you read through his whole epistle, you will 
find it is, from first to last, one continued vindication of the 
first principles of morality against the semblances of religion. 

He protested against the censoriousness which was found 
connected with peculiar claims of religious feelings. "If 
any man among you seem to be religious and bridleth not 
his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion 
is vain." He protested against that spirit which had crept 
into the Christian brotherhood, truckling to the rich and de- 
spising the poor. " If ye have respect of persons ye commit 
sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors." He 
protested against that sentimental fatalism which induced 
men to throw the blame of their own passions upon God. 



43 S The Tongue, 

" Let no man say, when he is tempted, I am tempted of God ; 
for God can not tempt to evil ; neither tempteth He any 
man." He protested against that unreal religion of excite- 
ment which diluted the earnestness of real religion in the en- 
joyment of listening. " Be ye doers of the word, and not 
hearers only ; deceiving your own souls." He protested 
against that trust in the correctness of theological doctrine 
which neglected the cultivation of character. " What doth 
it profit, if a man say that he hath faith, and have not works ? 
Can faith save him ?" 

Read St. James's epistle through, this is the mind breath- 
ing through it all : all this talk about religion, and spiritual- 
ity — words, words, words — nay, let us have realities. 

It is well known that Luther complained of this epistle, 
that it did not contain the Gospel ; for men who are ham- 
pered by a system will say — even of an inspired apostle — 
that he does not teach the Gospel if their own favorite doc- 
trine be not the central subject of his discourse ; but St. 
James's reply seems spontaneously to suggest itself to us. 
The Gospel ! how can we speak of the Gospel, when the 
first principles of morality are forgotten ? when Christians 
are excusing themselves, and slandering one another? How 
can the superstructure of love and faith be built, when the 
very foundations of human character — justice, mercy, truth 
— have not been laid ? 

L The license of the tongue. 
n. The guilt of that license. 

The first license given to the tongue is slander. I am not, 
of course, speaking now of that species of slander against 
which the law of libel provides a remedy, but of that of 
which the Gospel alone takes cognizance ; for the worst in- 
juries which man can do to man are precisely those which 
are too delicate for law to deal with. We consider therefore 
not the calumny which is reckoned such by the moralities of 
an earthly court, but that which is found guilty by the spirit- 
ualities of the courts of heaven — that is, the mind of God. 

Now observe, this slander is compared in the text to poi- 
son — " the tongue is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison." 
The deadliest poisons are those for which no test is known : 
there are poisons so destructive that a single drop insinuated 
into the veins produces death in three seconds, and yet no 
chemical science can separate that virus from the contam- 
inated blood, and show the metallic particles of poison glit- 
tering palpably, and say, "Behold, it is there !" 

In the drop of venom which distils from the sting of the 



The Tongue, 439 

smallest insect, or the spikes of the nettle-leaf, there is con- 
centrated the quintessence of a poison so subtle that the mi- 
croscope can not distinguish it, and yet so virulent that it 
can inflame the blood, irritate the whole constitution, and 
convert day and night into restless misery. 

In St. James's day, as now, it would appear that there 
were idle men and idle women, who went about from house 
to house, dropping slander as they went, and yet you could 
not take up that slander and detect the falsehood there. 
You could not evaporate the truth in the slow process of the 
crucible, and then show the residuum of falsehood glittering 
and visible. You could not fasten upon any word or sen- 
tence, and say that it was calumny ; for in order to consti- 
tute slander it is not necessary that the word spoken should 
be false — half truths are often more calumnious than whole 
falsehoods. It is not even necessary that a word should be 
distinctly uttered ; a dropped lip, and arched eyebrow, a 
shrugged shoulder, a significant look, an incredulous expres- 
sion of countenance, nay, even an emphatic silence, may do 
the work : and when the light and trifling thing which has 
done the mischief has fluttered ofl", the venom is left behind, 
to work and rankle, to inflame hearts, to fever human exist- 
ence, and to poison human society at the fountain - springs 
of life. Very emphatically was it said by one whose whole 
being had smarted under such aflliction, " Adder's poison is 
under their lips." 

The second license given to the tongue is in the way of 
persecution ; " therewith curse we men which are made after 
the similitude of God." " We !" — men who bear the name of 
Christ — curse our brethren ! Christians persecuted Chris- 
tians. Thus even in St. James's age that spirit had begun, 
the monstrous fact of Christian persecution ; from that day 
it has continued, through long centuries, up to the present 
time. The Church of Christ assumed the ofl&ce of denuncia- 
tion, and except in the first council, whose object was not to 
strain, but to relax the bonds of brotherhood, not a council 
has met for eighteen centuries which has not guarded each 
profession of belief by the too customary formula, "If any 
man maintain otherwise than this, let him be accursed." 

Myriad, countless curses have echoed through those long 
ages ; the Church has forgotten her Master's spirit and called 
down fire from heaven. A fearful thought to consider this 
as the spectacle on which the eye of God has rested. He 
looks down upon the creatures He has made, and hears every- 
where the language of religious imprecations : and, after all, 
who is proved right by curses ? 



440 The Tongue, 

The Church of Rome hurls her thunders against Protest- 
ants of every denomination : the Calvinist scarcely recog- 
nizes the Arminian as a Christian : he who considers himself 
as the true Anglican, excludes from the Church of Christ all 
but the adherents of his own orthodoxy ; every minister and 
congregation has its small circle beyond Avhich all are her- 
etics : nay, even among that sect which is most lax as to the 
dogmatic forms of truth, we find the Unitarian of the old 
school denouncing the spiritualism of the new and rising 
school. 

This is the state of things to which we are arrived. Sis- 
ters of Charity refuse to permit an act of charity to be done 
by a Samaritan ; ministers of the Gospel fling the thunder- 
bolts of the Lord ; ignorant hearers catch and exaggerate 
the spirit — boys, girls, and women shudder as one goes by, 
perhaps more holy than themselves, who adores the same 
God, believes in the same Redeemer, struggles in the same 
life-battle, and all this because they have been taught to 
look upon him as an enemy of God. 

There is a class of religious persons against whom this ve- 
hemence has been especially directed. No one who can read 
the signs of the times can help perceiving that we are on the 
eve of great changes, perhaps a disruption of the Church of 
England. Unquestionably there has been a large secession 
to the Church of Rome. 

Now what has been the position of those who are about 
to take this step ? They have been taunted with dishonest 
reception of the wages of the Church ; a watch has been set 
over them : not a word they uttered in private, or in public, 
but was given to the world by some religious busybody ; 
there was not a visit which they paid, not a foolish dress 
which they adopted, but became the subject of bitter scruti- 
ny and malevolent gossip. For years the religious press has 
denounced them with a vehemence as virulent, but happily 
more impotent than that of the Inquisition. There has been 
an anguish and an inward struggle little suspected, endured 
by men who felt themselves outcasts in their own society, 
and naturally looked for a home elsewhere. 

We congratulate ourselves that the days of persecution 
are gone by ; but persecution is that which affixes penalties 
upon mews held^ instead of upon life led. Is persecution only 
fire and sword ? But suppose a man of sensitive feeling 
says. The sword is less sharp to me than the slander : fire is 
less intolerable than the refusal of sympathy ! 

Now let us bring this home; you rejoice that the faggot 
and the stake are given up ; you never persecuted — you 



The Tongue. 441 

leave that to the wicked Church of Rome. Yes, you never 
burned a human bemg alive — you never clapped your hands 
as the death-shriek proclaimed that the lion's fang had gone 
home into the most vital part of the victim's frame ; but did 
you never rob him of his friends? — gravely shake your head 
and oracularly insinuate that he was leading souls to hell? — 
chill the affections of his family ? — take from him his good 
name ? Did you never with delight see his Church placard- 
ed as the Man of Sin, and hear the platform denunciations 
which branded it with the spiritual abominations of the 
Apocalypse ? Did you never find a malicious pleasure in re- 
peating all the miserable gossip with which religious slander 
fastened upon his daily acts, his words, and even his uncom- 
municated thoughts ? Did you never forget that for a man 
to " work out his own salvation with fear and trembling " is 
a matter difficult enough to be laid upon a human spirit, 
without intruding into the most sacred department of an- 
other's life — that, namely, which lies between himself and 
God ? Did you never say that " it was to be wished he 
should go to Rome," until at last life became intolerable — 
until he was thrown more and more in upon himself; found 
himself, like his Redeemer, in this world alone, but unable, like 
his Redeemer, calmly to repose upon the thought that his 
Father was with him ? Then a stern defiant spirit took pos- 
session of his soul, and there burst from his lips, or heart, 
the wish for rest — rest at any cost, peace anywhere, if even 
it is to be found only in the bosom of the Church of Rome I 

n. The guilt of this license. 

1, The first evil consequence is the harm that a man does 
himself: " so is the tongue among the members, that it de- 
files the whole body." It is not very obvious, in what way 
a man does himself harm by calumny. I will take the sim' 
plest form in which this injury is done ; it effects a dissipa- 
tion of spiritual energy. There are two ways in which the 
steam of machinery may find an outlet for its force : it may 
work, and if so it works silently ; or it may escape, and that 
takes place loudly, in air and noise. There are two ways in 
which the spiritual energy of a man's soul may find its vent : 
it may express itself in action, silently ; or in words, noisily: 
but just so much of force as is thrown into the one mode of 
expression is taken from the other. 

Few men suspect how much mere talk fritters away spir- 
itual energy — that which should be spent in action spends 
itself in words. The fluent boaster is not the man who is 
steadiest before the enemy ; it is well said to him that his 



442 The Tongue, 

courage is better kept till it is wanted. Loud utterance of 
virtuous indignation against evil from the platform, or in the 
drawing-room, do not characterize the spiritual giant : so 
much indignation as \s expressed, has found vent, is wasted, 
is taken away from the work of coping with evil ; the man 
has so much less left. And hence he who restrains that love 
of talk lays up a fund of spiritual strength. 

With large significance, St. James declares, "If any man 
offend not in word, the same is a perfect man, able also to 
bridle the whole body." He is entire, powerful, because he 
has not spent his strength. In these days of loud profession, 
and bitter, fluent condemnation, it is well for us to learn the 
divine force of silence. Remember Christ in the judgment- 
hall, the very symbol and incarnation of spiritual strength; 
and yet when revilings were loud around Him and charges 
multiplied, "He held His peace." 

2. The next feature in the guilt of calumny is its uncon- 
trollable character : " the tongue can no man tame." You 
can not arrest a calumnious tongue, you can not arrest the 
calumny itself; you may refute a slanderer, you may trace 
home a slander to its source, you may expose the author of 
it, you may by that exposure give a lesson so severe as to 
make the repetition of the offense appear impossible ; but 
the fatal habit is incorrigible ; to-morrow the tongue is at 
work again. 

Neither can you stop the consequences of a slander ; you 
may publicly prove its falsehood, you may sift every atom, 
explain and annihilate it, and yet, years after you had 
thought that all had been disposed of forever, the mention of 
a name wakes up associations in the mind of some one who 
heard the calumny, but never heard or never attended to 
the refutation, or who has only a vague and confused recol- 
lection of the whole, and he asks the question doubtfully, 
"But were there not some suspicious circumstances con- 
nected with him ?" 

It is like the Greek fire used in ancient warfare, which 
burnt unquenched beneath the water, or like the weeds 
which, when you have extirpated them in one place are 
sprouting forth vigorously in another spot, at the distance of 
many hundred yards ; or, to use the metaphor of St. James 
himself, it is like the wheel which catches fire as it goes, and 
burns with a fiercer conflagration as its own speed increases; 
" it sets on fire the whole course of nature " (literally, the 
wheel of nature). You may tame the wild beast, the con- 
flagration of the American forest will cease when all the 
timber and the dry underwood is consumed; but you can 



The Tongue. 443 

not arrest the progress of that cruel word which you uttered 
carelessly yesterday or this morning — which you will utter, 
perhaps, before you have passed from this church one hun- 
dred yards : that will go on slaying, poisoning, burning be- 
yond your own control, now and forever. 

3. The third element of guilt lies in the unnaturalness of 
calumny. " My brethren, these things ought not so to be ;" 
ought not — that is, they are unnatural. That this is St. 
James's meaning is evident from the second illustration 
which follows: "Doth a fountain send forth at the same 
place, sweet water and bitter?" "Can the fig-tree, my 
brethren, bear olive-berries, or a vine, figs." 

There is apparently in these metaphors little that afibrds 
an argument against slander; the motive which they sug- 
gest would appear to many far-fetched and of small cogency ; 
but to one who looks on this world as a vast whole, and 
who has recognized the moral law as only a part of the 
great law of the universe, harmoniously blending with the 
whole, illustrations such as these are the most powerful of 
all arguments. The truest definition of evil is that which 
represents it as something contrary to nature : evil is evil, 
because it is unnatural; a vine which should bear olive- 
berries, an eye to which blue seems yellow, would be dis- 
eased : an unnatural mother, an unnatural son, an unnatural 
act, are the strongest terms of condemnation. It is this 
view which Christianity gives of moral evil : the teaching 
of Christ was the recall of man to nature, not an infusion 
of something new into humanity. Christ came to call out 
all the principles and powers of human nature, to restore 
the natural equilibrium of all our faculties ; not to call us 
back to our own individual selfish nature, but to human 
nature as it is in -God's ideal — the perfect type which is to 
be realized in us. Christianity is the regeneration of our 
whole nature, not the destruction of one atom of it. 

Now the nature of man is to adore God and to love what 
is Godlike in man. The office of the tongue is to bless. 
Slander is guilty because it contradicts this; yet even in 
slander itself, perversion as it is, the interest of man in man 
is still distinguishable. What is it but perverted interest 
which makes the acts, and words, and thoughts of his breth- 
ren, even in their evil, a matter of such strange delight ? 
Remember, therefore, this contradicts your nature and your 
destiny ; to speak ill of others makes you a monster in God's 
world : get the habit of slander, and then there is not a 
stream which bubbles fresh from the heart of nature, there 
is not a tree that silently brings forth its genial fruit in its 



444 ^^^ Tongue. 

appointed season, which does not rebuke and proclaim you 
to be a monstrous anomaly in God's world. 

4. The fourth point of guilt is the diabolical character of 
slander; the tongue "is set on fire of hell." Now, this is 
no mere strong expression — no mere indignant vituperation 
— it contains deep and emphatic meaning. 

The apostle means literally what he says — slander is dia- 
bolical. The first illustration we give of this is contained 
in the very meaning of the word devil. "Devil," in the 
original, means traducer or slanderer. The first introduc- 
tion of a demon spirit is found connected with a slanderous 
insinuation against the Almighty, implying that His com- 
mand had been given in envy of His creature : " for God 
doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes 
shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and 
evil." 

In the magnificent imagery of the book of Job, the accuser 
is introduced with a demoniacal and malignant sneer, attrib- 
uting the excellence of a good man to interested motives ; 
" Doth Job serve God for naught ?" There is another mode 
in which the fearful accuracy of St. James's charge may be 
demonstrated. There is one state only from which there is 
said to be no recovery — there is but one sin that is called 
unpardonable. The Pharisees beheld the works of Jesus. 
They could not deny that they were good works, they 
could not deny that they were miracles of beneficence, but 
rather than acknowledge that they were done by a good 
man through the co-operation of a Divine spirit, they pre- 
ferred to account for them by the wildest and most incredi- 
ble hypothesis; they said they were done by the power of 
Beelzebub, the prince of the devils. It was upon this occa- 
sion that our Redeemer said with solemn meaning, "For 
every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give ac- 
count in the day of judgment." It was then that He said, 
for a w^ord spoken against the Holy Ghost there is no for- 
giveness in this world, or in the world to come. 

Our own hearts respond to the truth of this — to call evil, 
good, and good, evil — to see the Divinest good, and call it 
Satanic evil — below this lowest deep there is not a lower 
still. There is no cure for mortification of the flesh — there 
is no remedy for ossification of the heart. Oh, that misera- 
ble state, when to the jaundiced eye all good transforms 
itself into evil, and the very instruments of health become 
the poison of disease ! Beware of every approach of this ! 
beware of that spirit which controversy fosters, of watching 
only for the evil in the character of an antagonist I beware 



The Tongue, 445 

of that habit which becomes the slanderer's life, of magni- 
fying every speck of evil and closing the eye to goodness \ 
till at last men arrive at the state in which generous, uni' 
versal love (which is heaven) becomes impossible, and a sus- 
picious, universal hate takes possession of the heart, and thai 
is hell ! ^ 

There is one peculiar manifestation of this spirit to which 
I desire specially to direct your attention. 

The politics of the community are guided by the political 
press. The religious views of a vast number are formed by 
that portion of the press which is called religious ; it be- 
comes, therefore, a matter of deepest interest to inquire what 
is the spirit of that " religious press." I am not asking you 
what are the views maintained — whether Evangelical, An- 
glican, or Romish — but what is the spirit of that fountain 
from which the religious life of so many is nourished ? 

Let any man cast his eye over the pages of this portion of 
the press — it matters little to which party the newspaper or 
the journal may belong — he will be startled to find the char- 
acters of those whom he has most deeply reverenced, whose 
hearts he knows, whose integrity and life are above suspi- 
cion, held up to scorn and hatred : the organ of one party is 
established against the organ of another, and it is the recog- 
nized office of each to point out with microscopic care the 
names of those whose views are to be shunned ; and in order 
that these may be the more shrunk from, the characters of 
those who hold such opinions are traduced and vilified. 
There is no personality too mean — there is no insinuation too 
audacious or too false for the recklessness of these daring 
slanderers. I do not like to use the expression, lest it should 
appear to be merely one of theatrical vehemence ; but I say 
it in all seriousness, adopting the inspired language of the 
Bible, and using it advisedly and with accurate meaning; 
the spirit which guides the " religious press " of this country 
— which dictates those personalities, which prevents contro- 
versialists from seeing what is good in their opponents, which 
attributes low motives to account for excellent lives, and 
teaches men whom to suspect and shun, rather than point 
out where it is possible to admire and love — is a spirit " set 
on fire of hell." 

Before we conclude, let us get at the root of the matter. 
" Man," says the Apostle James, " was made in the image 
of God :" to slander man is to slander God : to love what is 
good in man is to love it in God. Love is the only remedy 
for slander : no set of rules or restrictions can stop it ; we 
may denounce, but we shall denounce in vain. The radical 



446 The Victory of Faith, 

cure of it is charity — "out of a pure heart and faith unfeign- 
ed," to feel what is great in the human character; to recog- 
nize with delight all high, and generous, and beautiful ac- 
tions ; to find a joy even in seeing the good qualities of your 
bitterest opponents, and to admire those qualities even in 
those with whom you have least sympathy — be it either the 
Romanist or the IJnitarian — this is the only spirit which can 
heal the love of slander and calumny. If we would bless 
God, we must first learn to bless man, who is made in the 
image of God. 



II. 
THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 

'Tor whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the 
victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he that over- 
cometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?" — 
1 John V. 4, 5. 

There are two words in the system of Christianity which 
have received a meaning so new, and so emphatic, as to be 
in a way peculiar to it, and to distinguish it from all other 
systems of morality and religion; these two words are — the 
world, and faith. We find it written in Scripture that to 
have the friendship of the world is to be the enemy of God ; 
whereupon the question arises — the world ? — did not God 
make the world ? Did He not place us in the world ? Are 
we not to love what God has made ? And yet meeting this 
distinctly we have the inspired record, " Love not the world." 

The object of the statesman is, or ought to be, to produce 
as much worldly prosperity as possible ; but Christianity, 
that is Christ, speaks little of this world's prosperity, under- 
rates it — nay, speaks of it at times as infinitely dangerous. 

The legislator prohibits crime — the moralist transgression 
— the religionist sin. To these Christianity superadds a new 
enemy — the world and the things of the world. " If any 
man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him." 

The other word used in a peculiar sense is faith. It is 
impossible for any one to have read his Bible ever so negli- 
gently, and not to be aware that the word faith, or the grace 
of faith, forms a large element in the Christian system. It is 
said to work miracles, remove mountains, justify the soul, 
trample upon impossibilities. Every apostle, in his way, as- 
signs to faith a primary importance. Jude tells us to " build 



The Victory of Faith. 447 

up ourselves in our most holy faith." John tells us that — 
" he that believeth that Jesus is the Christ, is born of God ;" 
and Paul tells us that, not by merit nor by works, but by 
trust or reliance only, can be formed that state of soul by 
which man is reckoned just before God. In these expres- 
sions the apostles only develop their Master's meaning, when 
He uses such words as these, "All things are possible to him 
that believeth :" " Oh thou of little faith, wherefore didst 
thou doubt ?" 

These two words are brought into diametrical opposition 
in the text, so that it branches into a twofold line of thought. 

I. The Christian's enemy, the world. 
II. The victory of faith. 

In endeavoring to understand first what is meant by 
the world, we shall feel that the mass of evil which is com- 
prehended under this expression can not be told out in any 
one sermon ; it is an expression used in various ways, some- 
times meaning one thing, sometimes meaning another ; but 
we will endeavor to explain its general principles — and 
these we will divide into three heads ; first, the tyranny of 
the present ; secondly, the tyranny of the sensual ; and last- 
ly, the spirit of society. 

1. The tyranny of the present. 

" Christ," says the Apostle Paul, *' hath redeemed us from 
this present evil world ;" and again, " Demas hath forsaken 
me, having loved this present world." 

Let a stress be laid on the word present. World liness is 
the attractive power of something present, in opposition to 
something to come. It is this rule and tyranny of the pres- 
ent that constitutes Demas a worldly man. 

In this respect worldliness is the spirit of childhood carried 
on into manhood. The child lives in the present hour — to- 
day to him is every thing. The holiday promised at a distant 
interval is no holiday at all — it must be either now or never. 
Natural in the child, and therefore pardonable, this spirit,, 
when carried on into manhood, is coarse — is worldliness. The 
most distinct illustration given us of this, is the case of Esau. 
Esau came from the hunting-field worn and hungry ; the only 
means of procuring the tempting mess of his brother's pot- 
tage was the sacrifice of his father's blessing, which in those 
ages carried with it a substantial advantage ; but that birth- 
right could be enjoyed only after years — the pottage was 
present^ near and certain ; therefore he sacrificed a future and 
higher blessing for a present and lower pleasure. For this 
reason Esau is the Bible type of worldliness ; he is called in 



44 8 The Victory of Faith. 

Scripture a profane, that is, not a distinctly vicious, but a 
secular or worldly person — an overgrown child ; impetuous, 
inconsistent, not without gleams of generosity and kindliness, 
but ever accustomed to immediate gratification. 

In this worldliness, moreover, is to be remarked the game- 
ster's desperate play. There is a gambling spirit in hu- 
man nature. Esau distinctly expresses this : " Behold I am 
at the point to die, and what shall my birthright profit me ?" 
He might never live to enjoy his birthright; but the pottage 
was before him, present, certain, there. 

Now, observe the utter powerlessness of mere preaching 
to cope with this tyrannical power of the present. Forty 
thousand pulpits throughout the land this day will declaim 
against the vanity of riches, the uncertainty of life, the sin of 
worldliness — against the gambling spirit of human nature ; 
I ask what impression will be produced by those forty thou- 
sand harangues ? In every congregation it is reducible to a 
certainty that, before a year has passed, some will be num- 
bered with the dead. Every man knows this, but he thinks 
the chances are that it will not be himself; he feels it a 
solemn thing for humanity generally — but for himself there 
is more than a chance. Upon this chance he plays away 
life. 

It is so with the child : you tell him of the consequences 
of to-day's idleness — but the sun is shining brightly, and he 
can not sacrifice to-day's pleasure, although he knows the dis- 
grace it will bring to-morrow. So it is with the intemperate 
man : he says — " Suflacient unto the day is the evil and the 
good thereof; let me have my portion now." So the. one 
great secret of the world's victory lies in the mighty power 
of saying ''''NowP 

2. The tyranny of the sensual. 

I call it tyranny^ because the evidences of the senses are 
all-powerful, in spite of the protestations of the reason. In 
vain you try to persuade the child that he is moving, and not 
the trees which seem to flit past the carriage — in vain we re- 
mind ourselves that this apparently solid earth on which we 
stand, and which seems so immovable, is in reality flying 
through the regions of space with an inconceivable rapidity — 
in vain philosophers would persuade us that the color which 
the eye beholds resides not in the object itself, but in our own 
perception ; we are victims of the apparent, and the verdict 
of the senses is taken instead of the verdict of the reason. 

Precisely so is it with the enjoyments of the world. The 
man who died yesterday, and whom the world called a suc- 
cessful man — for what did he live ? He lived for this world 



The Victory of Faith, 449 

— he gained this world. Houses, lands, name, position in so- 
ciety — all that earth could give of enjoyments — he had : he 
was the man of whom the Redeemer said that his thoughts 
were occupied in planning how to pull down his barns and 
build greater. We hear men complain of the sordid love of 
gold, but gold is merely a medium of exchange for other 
things : gold is land, titles, name, comfort — all that the world 
can'give. If the world be all^ it is icise to live for gold. There 
may be some little difference in the degree of degradation 
in different forms of worldliness ; it is possible that the am- 
bitious man who lives for power is somewhat higher than he 
who merely lives for applause, and he again may be a trifle 
higher than the mere seeker after gold — but, after all, look- 
ing closely at the matter, you will find that, in respect of the 
objects of their idolatry, they agree in this, that all belong 
to the present. Therefore, says the apostle, all that is in the 
world — " the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the 
pride of life, is not of the Father, but of the world," and are 
only various forms of one great tyranny. And then, when 
such a man is at the brink of death, the words said to the man 
in our Lord's parable must be said to him, " Thou fool, the 
houses thou hast built, the enjoyments thou hast prepared, 
and all those things which have formed thy life for years — • 
when thy soul is taken from them, what shall they profit 
thee?" 

3. The spirit of society. 

The icorld has various meanings in Scripture : it does not 
always mean the visible, as opposed to the invisible ; nor the 
present, as opposed to the future : it sometimes stands for the 
secular spirit of the day — the voice of society. 

Our Saviour says, " If ye were of the world, the world 
would love his own." The apostle says, " Be not conformed 
to this world ;" and to the Gentiles' he writes, " In time 
past ye walked according ' to the course of this world, the 
spirit which now worketh in the children of disobedience." In 
these verses, a tone, a temper, a spirit is spoken of. There 
are two things — the Church and the world — tAvo spirits per- 
vading different bodies of men, brought before us in these 
verses — those called the Spirit-born, and those called the 
world, vv-hich is to be overcome by the Spirit-bom, as in the 
text, " Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world." 

Let us understand what is meant by the Church of God. 
When we speak of the Church we generally mean a society 
to aid men in their progress Godward ; but the Church of 
God is by no means co-extensive in any age with that organ- 
ized institution which we call t\\Q Church; sometimes it is 
p 



450 The Victory of Faith. 

nearly co-extensive — that is, nearly all on earth who are bora 
of God are found within its pale, nearly all who are of the 
world are extraneous to it — but sometimes the born of God 
have been found distinct from the institution called the 
Church, opposed to it — persecuted by it. The institution of 
the Church is a blessed ordinance of God, organized on earth 
for the purpose of representing the eternal Church and of 
extending its limits, but still ever subordinate to it. 

The eternal Church is " the general assembly and church 
of the firstborn which are written in heaven ;" the selected 
spirits of the Most High, who are struggling with the evil of 
their day ; sometimes alone, like Elijah, and like him, long- 
ing that their work was done ; sometimes conscious of their 
union with each other. God is forever raising up a succes- 
sion of these — His brave. His true. His good. Apostolical 
succession, as taught sometimes, means simply this — a suc- 
cession of miraculous powers flowing in a certain line. The 
true apostolic succession is — not a succession in a hereditary 
line, or line marked by visible signs which men can always 
identify, but a succession emphatically spiritual. 

The Jews looked for a hereditary succession ; they thought 
that because they were Abraham's seed, the spiritual succes- 
sion was preserved ; the Redeemer told them that " God was 
able of those stones to raise up children unto Abraham." 
Therefore is this ever a spiritual succession — in the hands of 
God alone ; and they are here called the God-born, coming 
into the world variously qualified ; sometimes baptized with 
the spirit which makes them, like James and John, the "sons 
of thunder," sometimes with a milder spirit, as Barnabas, 
which makes them " sons of consolation," sometimes having 
their souls indurated into an adamantine hardness, which 
makes them living stones — rocks like Peter, against which 
the billows of this world dash themselves in vain, and against 
which the gates of hell shall not prevail. But whether as 
apostles, or visitors of the poor, or parents of a family, born 
to do a work on earth, to speak a word, to discharge a mis- 
sion which they themselves perhaps do not know till it is ac- 
complished — these are the Church of God — the children of 
the Most High — the noble army of the Spirit-born ! Op- 
posed to this stands the mighty confederacy called the world. 
But beware of fixing on individual men in order to stigmatize 
them as the world. You may not draw a line and say — " We 
are the sons of God, ye are of the world." The world is not 
so much individual as it is a certain spirit; the course of this 
world is " the spirit which now worketh in the children of 
disobedience." The world and the Church are annexed as 



The Victory of Faith. 451 

inseparably as the elements which compose the atmosphere. 
Take the smallest portion of this that you will, in a cubic 
inch the same proportions are found as in a temple. In the 
ark there was a Ham ; in the small band of the twelve apos- 
tles there was a Judas. 

The spirit of the world is forever altering — impalpable ; 
forever eluding, in fresh forms, your attempts to seize it. In 
the days of Noah, the spirit of the world was violence. In 
Elijah's day it was idolatry. In the day of Christ it was 
power concentrated and condensed in the government of 
liome. In ours, perhaps, it is the love of money. It enters 
in different proportions into different bosoms ; it is found in 
a different form in contiguous towns; in the fashionable 
watering-place, and in the commercial city : it is this thing 
at Athens, and another in Corinth. This is the spirit of the 
world — a thing in my heart and yours: to be struggled 
against, not so much in the case of others, as in the silent 
battle to be done within our own souls. Pass we on now to 
consider — 

n. The victory of faith. 

Faith is a theological expression ; we are apt to forget 
that it has any other than a theological import ; yet it is the 
commonest principle of man's daily life, called in that region 
prudence, enterprise, or some such name. It is in effect the 
principle on which alone any human superiority can be 
gained. Faith, in religion, is the same principle as faith in 
worldly matters, differing only in its object : it rises through 
successive stages. When, in reliance upon your promise, 
your child gives up the half-hour's idleness of to-day for the 
holiday of to-morrow, he lives by faith ; a future supersedes 
the present pleasure. When he abstains from over-indul- 
gence of the appetite, in reliance upon your word that the 
result will be pain and sickness, sacrificing the present pleas- 
ure for fear of future punishment, he acts on faith : I do not 
say that this is a high exercise of faith — it is a very low one 
— but it is faith. 

Once more : the same motive of action may be carried on 
into manhood ; in our own times two religious principles 
have been exemplified in the subjugation of a vice. The hab- 
it of intoxication has been broken by an appeal to the prin- 
ciple of combination, and the principle of belief Men were 
taught to feel that they were not solitary strugglers against 
the vice ; they were enrolled in a mighty army, identified in 
principles and interests. Here was the principle of tho 
Church — association for reciprocated strength ; they were 



452 The Victory of Faith. 

thus taught the inevitable result of the indulgence of the 
vice. The missionaries of temperance went through the 
country contrasting the wretchedness and the degradation 
and the filth of drunkenness, with the domestic comfort and 
the health and the regular employment of those who were 
masters of themselves. So far as men believed this, and gave 
up the tyranny of the present for the hope of the future — so 
far they lived by faith. 

Brethren, I do not say that this was a high triumph for 
the principle of faith ; it was, in fact, little more than selfish- 
ness ; it was a high future balanced against a low present ; 
only the preference of a future and higher physical enjoy- 
ment to a mean and lower one. Yet still, to be ruled by this 
influence raises a man in the scale of being : it is a low vir- 
tue, prudence, a form of selfishness ; yet prudence is a virtue. 
The merchant who forecasts, saves, denies himself systemati- 
cally through years, to amass a fortune, is not a very lofty 
being, yet he is higher, as a man, than he who is sunk in 
mere bodily gratifications. You would not say that the in- 
temperate man — who has become temperate in order merely 
to gain by that temperance honor and happiness — is a great 
man, but you would say he was a higher and a better man 
than he who is enslaved by his passions, or than the gambler 
who improvidently stakes all upon a moment's throw. The 
worldly mother who plans for the advancement of a family, 
and sacrifices solid enjoyments for a splendid alliance, is only 
worldly wise, yet in that manoeuvring and worldly prudence 
there is the exercise of a self-control which raises her above 
the mere giddy pleasure-hunter of the hour; for want of self- 
control is the weakness of our nature — to restrain, to wait, 
to control present feeling with a large foresight, is human 
strength. 

Once more : instead of a faith like that of the child, which 
overleaps a few hours, or that of the worldly man, which 
overpasses years, there may be a faith which transcends the 
whole span of life, and, instead of looking for temporal en- 
joyments, looks for rewards in a future beyond the grave, 
instead of a future limited to time. 

This is again a step. The child has sacrificed a day ; the 
man has sacrificed a little more. Faith has now reached a 
stage which deserves to be called religious ; not that this, 
however, is very grand ; it does but prefer a happiness here- 
after to a happiness enjoyed here — an eternal well-being in- 
stead of a temporal well-being ; it is but prudence on a grand 
scale — another form of selfishness — an anticipation of infinite 
rewards instead of finite, and not the more noble because of 



The Victory of Faith. 453 

the infinitude of tlie gain : and yet this is what is often 
taught as religion in books and sermons. We are told that 
sin is wrong, because it will make us miserable hereafter. 
Guilt is represented as the short-sightedness which barters 
for a home on earth — a home in heaven. 

In the text-book of ethics studied in one of our universi- 
ties, virtue is defined as that which is done at the command 
of God for the sake of an eternal reward. So, then, religion 
is nothing more than a calculation of infinite and finite quan- 
tities ; vice is nothing more than a grand imprudence ; and 
heaven is nothing more than selfishness rewarded with eter- 
nal well-being ! 

Yet this, you will observe, is a necessary step in the de- 
velopment of faith. Faith is the conviction that God is a 
rewarder of them who diligently seek Him ; and there is a 
moment in human progress when the anticipated rewards 
and punishments must be of a Mohammedan character — the 
happiness of the senses. It was thus that the Jews were 
disciplined ; out of a coarse, rude, infantine state, they w^ere 
educated by rewards and punishments to abstain from pres- 
ent sinful gratification : at first, the promise of the life which 
now is, afterwards the promise of that which is to come ; 
but even then the rewards and punishments of a future state 
were spoken of, by inspiration itself, as of an arbitrary char- 
acter ; and some of the best of the Israelites, in looking to 
the recompense of rew^ard, seemed to have anticipated, coarse- 
ly, recompense in exchange for duties performed. 

The last step is that which alone deserves to be called 
Christian faith — "Who is he that overcometh but he that 
believeth Jesus is the Christ ?" The difierence between the 
faith of the Christian and that of the man of the world, or 
the mere ordinary religionist, is not a difierence in mental 
operation, but in the object of the faith — to believe that 
Jesus is the Christ is the peculiarity of Christian faith. 

The anticipated heaven of the Christian differs from the 
anticipated heaven of any other man, not in the distinctness 
with which its imagery is perceived, but in the kind of ob- 
jects which are hoped for. The apostle has told us the char- 
acter of heaven. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither 
hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive the things 
which God hath prepared for them that love Him" — w^hich 
glorious w^ords are sometimes strangely misinterpreted, as if 
the apostle merely meant rhetorically to exalt the conception 
of the heavenly world, as of something beyond all power to 
imagine or to paint. The apostle meant something infinitely 
deeper : the heaven of God is not only that which " eye hath 



454 'The Victory of Faith, 

not seen," but that Avhich eye can neiier see ; its glories are 
not of that kind at all which can ever stream in forms of 
beauty on the eye, or pour in melody upon the enraptured 
ear — not such joys as genius in its most gifted hour (here 
called " the heart of man ") can invent or imagine : it is 
something which these sensuous organs of ours never can 
appreciate — bliss of another kind altogether, revealed to the 
spirit of man by the Spirit of God — ^joys such as spirit alone 
can receive. 

Do you ask what these are ? " The fruits of the Spirit 
are love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 
meekness, temperance." That is heaven, and therefore the 
apostle tells us that he alone who " believeth that Jesus is 
the Christ," and only he, feels that. What is it to believe 
that Jesus is the Christ? — That He is the Anointed One, 
that His life is the anointed life, the only blessed life, the 
blessed life Divine for thirty years ? Yes, but if so, the bless- 
ed life still, continued throughout all eternity : unless you 
believe that, you do not believe that Jesus is the Christ. 

What is the blessedness that you expect? — to have the 
joys of earth with the addition of the element of eternity ? 
Men think that heaven is to be a compensation for earthly 
loss : the saints are earthly- wretched here, the children of 
this world are earthly-happy ; but tJiat^ they think, shall be 
all reversed — Lazarus, beyond the grave, shall have the pur- 
ple and the fine linen, and the splendor, and the houses, and 
the lands which Dives had on earth : the one had them for 
time, the other shall have them for eternity. That is the 
heaven that men expect — this earth sacrificed now^ in order 
that it may be re-granted forever. 

Nor will this expectation be reversed except by a rever- 
sal of the nature. N'one can anticipate such a heaven as 
God has revealed, except they that are born of the Spirit ; 
therefore to believe that Jesus is the Christ, a man must be 
born of God. You will observe that no other victory over- 
comes the world : for this is w^hat St. John means by say- 
ing, " Who is he that overcome th the world, but he that be- 
lieveth that Jesus is the Christ ?" For then it comes to pass 
that a man begins to feel that to do wrong is hell ; and that 
to love God, to be like God, to have the mind of Christ, is 
the only heaven. Until this victory is gained, the world re- 
tains its stronghold in the heart. 

Do you think that the temperate man has overcome the 
world, who, instead of the short-lived rapture of intoxication, 
chooses regular employment, health, and prosperity? Is it 
not the world in another form which has his homage? Or 



The Dispensation of the Spirit, 455 

do you suppose that the so-called religious man is really the 
world's conqueror by being content to give up seventy 
years of enjoyment in order to win innumerable ages of the 
very same species of enjoyment ? Has he not only made 
earth a hell, in order that earthly things may be his heaven 
forever ? 

Thus the victory of faith proceeds from stage to stage : 
the first victory is, when the present is conquered by the fu- 
ture ; the last, when the visible and sensual is despised in 
comparison of the invisible and eternal. Then earth has 
lost its power forever ; for if all that it has to give be lost 
eternally, the gain of faith is still infinite. 



III. 
THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT. 

"Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit." — 1 Cor. xii. 4. 

AccoRDixG to a view which contains in it a profound truth, 
the ages of the world are divisible into three dispensations, 
presided over by the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. 

In the dispensation of the Father, God was known as a 
Creator; creation manifested His eternal power and God- 
head, and the religion of mankind was the religion of nature. 

In the dispensation of the Son, God manifested Himself to 
humanity through man ; the Eternal Word spoke, through 
the inspired and gifted of the human race, to those that were 
uninspired and ungifted. This was the dispensation of the 
prophets — its climax was the advent of the Redeemer ; it 
was completed when perfect Humanity manifested God to 
man. The characteristic of this dispensation was, that God 
revealed Himself by an authoritative Voice, speaking from 
without, and the highest manifestation of God whereof man 
was capable, was a Divine humanity. 

The age in which we at present live is the dispensation of 
the Spirit, in which God has communicated Himself by the 
highest revelation, and in the most intimate communion, of 
which man is capable; no longer through creation, no more 
as an authoritative Voice from without, but as a Law within 
— as a Spirit mingling with a spirit. This is the dispensa- 
tion of which the prophet said of old, that the time should 
come when they should no longer teach every man his broth- 
er and every man his neighbor, saying, "Know the Lord"-^ 



45^ The Dispensation of the Spirit, 

that is, by a will revealed by external authority from other 
human minds — " for they shall all know Him, from the least 
of them to the greatest." This is the dispensation, too, of 
whose close the Apostle Paul speaks thus : " Then shall the 
Son also be subject to Him that hath put all things under 
Him, that God may be all in all." 

The outward humanity is to disappear, that the inward 
union may be complete. To the same effect, he speaks in 
another place, " Yea, though we have known Christ after the 
flesh, yet henceforth know we Him no more." For this rea- 
son the ascension was necessary before Pentecost could come : 
the Spirit was not given, we are told, because Jesus was not 
yet glorified. It was necessary for the Son to disappear as 
an outward authority, in order that He might re-appear as an 
inward principle of life. Our salvation is no longer God 
manifested in a Christ without us, but as a Christ within us, 
the hope of glory. To-day is the selected anniversary of 
that memorable day when the first proof was given to the 
senses, in the gift of Pentecost, that that spiritual dispensa- 
tion had begun. 

There is a twofold way in which the operations of the 
Spirit on mankind may be considered — His influence on the 
Church as a whole, and His influence on individuals ; both 
of these are brought together in the text. It branches, there- 
fore, into a twofold division. 

I. Spiritual gifts conferred on individuals. 
II. Spiritual union of the Church. 

Let us distinguish between the Spirit and the gifts of the 
Spirit : by the Spirit, the apostle meant the vital principle 
of new life from God, common to all believers — the animat- 
ing Spirit of the Church of God ; by the gifts of the Spirit, he 
meant the diversities of form in which He operates on indi- 
viduals ; its influence varied according to their respective pe- 
culiarities and characteristics. In the twenty-eighth verse 
of this chapter a full catalogue of gifts is found ; looking at 
them generally, we discover two classes into which they may 
be divided — the first are natural, the second are supernatu- 
ral : the first are those capacities which are originally found 
in human nature — personal endowments of mind, a character 
elevated and enlarged by the gift of the Spirit ; the second 
are those which were created and called into existence by the 
sudden approach of the same influence. 

Just as if the temperature of this northern hemisphere were 
raised suddenly, and a mighty tropical river were to pour its 
fertilizing inundation over the country, the result would be 



The Dispensation of the spirit. 457 

the impartation of a vigorous and gigantic growth to the 
vegetation ah-eady in existence, and at the same time the de- 
velopment of life in seeds and germs which had long lain 
latent in the soil, incapable of vegetation in the unkindly 
climate of their birth. Exactly in the same way, the flood 
of a Divine life, poured suddenly into the souls of men, en- 
larged and ennobled qualities which had been used already, 
and at the same time developed powers which never could 
have become apparent in the cold, low temperature of natu- 
ral life. 

Among the natural gifts, we may instance these : teaching 
— healing — the power of government. Teaching is a gift, 
natural or acquired. To know, is one thing ; to have the 
capacity of imparting knowledge, is another. 

The physician's art, again, is no supernatural mystery ; long 
and careful study of physical laws capacitate him for his 
task. To govern, again, is a natural faculty : it may be ac- 
quired by habit, but there are some who never could acquire 
it. Some men seem born to command : place them in what 
sphere you will, others acknowledge their secret influence 
and subordinate themselves to their will. The faculty of or- 
ganization, the secret of rule, need no supernatural power. 
They exist among the uninspired. ISTow the doctrine of the 
apostle was, that all these are transformed and renovated by 
the spirit of a new life in such a way as to become almost 
new powers, or, as he calls them, gifts of the Spirit. A re- 
markable illustration of this is his view" of the human body. 
If there be any thing common to us by nature, it is the mem- 
bers of our corporeal frame ; yet the apostle taught that 
these, guided by the Spirit as its instruments and obeying a 
holy will, became transfigured ; so that, in his language, the 
body becomes a temple of the Holy Ghost, and the meanest 
faculties, the lowest appetites, the humblest organs, are en- 
nobled by the Spirit-mind which guides them. Thus he bids 
the Romans yield themselves " unto God as those that are 
alive from the dead, and their members as instruments of 
righteousness unto God." 

The second class of gifts are supernatural : of these we find 
two pre-eminent — the gift of tongues, and the gift of proph- 
ecy. 

It does not appear that the gift of tongues was merely the 
imparted faculty of speaking foreign languages — it could not 
be that the highest gift of God to His Church merely made 
them rivals of the linguist; it would rather seem that the 
Spirit of God, mingling with the soul of man, supernaturally 
elevated its aspirations and glorified its conceptions, so that 



458 The Dispensation of the Spirit, 

an entranced state of ecstacy was produced, and feelings 
called into energy, for the expression of which the ordinary 
forms of speech were found inadequate. Even in a far lower 
department, when a man becomes possessed of ideas for 
which his ordinary vocabulary supplies no suflficient expres- 
sion, his language becomes broken, incoherent, struggling, 
and almost unnaturally elevated ; much more was it to be 
expected that when divine and new feelings rushed like a 
flood upon the soul, the language of men would have be- 
come strange and extraordinary ; but in that supposed case, 
wild as the expressions might appear to one coldly looking 
on and not participating in the feelings of the speaker, they 
would be quite sufiicient to convey intelligible meaning to 
any one affected by the same emotions. 

Where perfect sympathy exists, incoherent utterance — a 
word — a syllable — is quite as efficient as elaborate sentences. 
Now this is precisely the account given of the phenomenon 
which attended the gift of tongues. On the day of Pente- 
cost, all who were in the same state of spiritual emotion as 
those who spoke, understood the speakers ; each was as intel- 
ligible to all as if he spoke in their several tongues: to those 
who were coolly and skeptically watching, the effects ap- 
peared like those of intoxication. A similar account is given 
by the Apostle Paul : the voice appeared to unsympathetic 
ears as that of a barbarian ; the uninitiated and unbelieving 
coming in, heard nothing that was articulate to them, but 
only what seemed to them the ravings of insanity. 

The next was the gift of prophecy. Prophecy has several 
meanings in Scripture ; sometimes it means the power of pre- 
dicting future events^ sometimes an entranced state accom- 
panied with ravings, sometimes it appears to mean only ex- 
position ; but prophecy, as the miraculous spiritual gift grant- 
ed to the early Church, seems to have been a state of com- 
munion with the mind of God lower than that which was 
called the gift of tongues, at least less ecstatic, less rapt into 
the world to come, more under the guidance of the reason^ 
more within the control of calm consciousness — as we might 
say, less supernatural. 

Upon these gifts we make two observations : 

1. Even the highest were not accompanied with spiritual 
faultlessness. Inspiration was one thing, infallibility another. 
The gifts of the Spirit were, like the gifts of nature, subor- 
dinated to the will — capable of being used for good or evil, 
sometimes pure, sometimes mixed with human infirmity. The 
supernaturally gifted man was no mere machine, no automa- 
ton ruled in spite -of himself by a superior spirit. Disorder, 



The Dispensation of the Spirit, 459 

vanity, overweening self-estimation, might accompany these 
gifts, and the prophetic utterance itself might be degraded 
to a mere brawling in the Church ; therefore St. Paul estab- 
lished laws of control, declared the need of subjection and 
rule over spiritual gifts : the spirits of the prophets were to 
be subject to the prophets ; if those in the ecstatic state were 
tempted to break out into utterance and unable to interpret 
what it meant, those so gifted were to hold their peace. 

The prophet poured out the truths supernaturally impart- 
ed to his highest spirit, in an inspired and impassioned elo- 
quence which was intelligible even to the unspiritual, and 
was one of the appointed means of convincing the unconvert- 
ed. The lesson derivable from this is not obsolete even in 
the present day. There is nothing perhaps precisely identi- 
cal in our own day with those gifts of the early Church ; 
but genius and talent are uncommon gifts, which stand in a 
somewhat analogous I'elation — in a closer one certainly — than 
more ordinary endowments. The flights of genius, we know, 
appear like maniac ravings to minds not elevated to the same 
spiritual level. Now these are perfectly compatible with 
misuse, abuse, and moral disorder. The most gifted of our 
countrymen has left this behind him as his epitaph, "The 
greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind." The most glorious 
gift of poetic insight — itself in a way divine — having some- 
thing akin to Deity — is too often associated with degraded 
life and vicious character. Those gifts which elcA^ate us above 
the rest of our species, whereby we stand aloof and separate 
from the crowd, convey no moral — nor even mental — infalli- 
bility : nay, they have in themselves a peculiar danger, where- 
as, that gift which is common to us all as brethren, the ani- 
mating spirit of a divine life, in whose soil the spiritual being 
of all is rooted, can not make us vain; we can not pride our- 
selves on that^ for it is common to us all. 

2. Again, the gifts which were higher in one sense were 
lower in another; as supernatural gifts they would rank thus 
— the gift of tongues before prophecy, and prophecy before 
teaching ; but as blessings to be desired, this order is reversed : 
rather than the gift of tongues, St. Paul bids the Corinthians 
desire that they might prophesy. Inferior, again, to prophecy 
was the quite simple, and as we should say, lower faculty of 
explaining truth. Kow the principle upon which that was 
tried was that of utility — not utility in the low sense of the 
utilitarian, who measures the value of a thing by its suscep- 
tibility of application to the purpose of this present life, but 
a utility whose measure was love, charity. The apostle con- 
sidered that gift most desirable by which men might most 



460 The Dispensation of the Spirit. 

edify one another. And hence that noble declaration of one 
of the most gifted of mankind — " I had rather speak five 
words with my understanding, that I might teach others also, 
than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue." 

Our estimate is almost the reverse of this : we value a gift 
in proportion to its rarity, its distinctive character, separating 
its possessor from the rest of his fellow-men ; whereas, in 
truth, those gifts which leave us in lonely majesty apart from 
our species, useless to them, benefiting ourselves alone, are 
not the most Godlike, but the least so ; because they are dis- 
severed from that beneficent charity which is the very being 
of God. Your lofty incommunicable thoughts, your ecsta- 
sies, and aspirations, and contemplative raptures — in virtue 
of which you have estimated yourself as the porcelain of the 
earth, of another nature altogether than the clay of common 
spirits — tried by the test of charity, what is there grand in 
these if they can not be applied as blessings to those that are 
beneath you ? One of our countrymen has achieved for him- 
self extraordinary scientific renown ; he pierced the mysteries 
of nature, he analyzed her processes, he gave new elements 
to the world. The same man applied his rare intellect to the 
construction of a simple and very common instrument — that 
well-known lamp which has been the guardian of the miner's 
life from the explosion of fire. His discoveries are his nobil- 
ity in this world, his trifling invention gives him rank in the 
world to come. By the former he shines as one of the bright- 
est luminaries in the firmament of science, by the latter, evinc- 
ing a spirit animated and directed by Christian love, he takes 
his place as one of the Church of God. 

And such is ever the true order of rank which graces oc- 
cupy in reference to gifts. The most trifling act which is 
marked by usefulness to others is nobler in God's sight than 
the most brilliant accomplishment of genius. To teach a 
few Sunday-school children, week after week, commonplace, 
simple truths — persevering in spite of dullness and mean ca- 
pacities — is a more glorious occupation than the highest 
meditations or creations of genius which edify or instruct 
only our own solitary soul. 

II. The spiritual unity of the Church — "the same Spirit" 
Men have formed to themselves two ideas of unity : the 
first is a sameness of form — of expression ; the second an 
identity of spirit. Some of the best of mankind have fondly 
hoped to realize an unity for the Church of Christ which 
should be manifested by uniform expressions in every thing ; 
their imaginations have loved to paint, as the ideal of a 



The Dispensation of the Spirit. 461 

Christian Chiircli, a state in which the same liturgy should 
be used throughout the world, the same ecclesiastical gov- 
ernment, even the same vestments, the same canonical hours, 
the same form of architecture. They could conceive noth- 
ing more entirely one than a Church so constituted that the 
same prayers, in the very same expressions, at the very same 
moment, should be ascending to the Eternal Ear. 

There are others who have thrown aside entirely this idea 
as chimerical ; who have not only ceased to hope it, but even 
to w^ish it ; who, if it could be realized, would consider it a 
matter of regret ; who feel that the minds of men are vari- 
ous — their modes' and habits of thought, their original ca- 
pacities and acquired associations, infinitely diverse ; and 
who, perceiving that the law of the universal system is 
manifoldness in unity, have ceased to expect any other one- 
ness for the Church *^ of Christ than that of a sameness of 
spirit, showing itself through diversities of gifts. Among 
these last was the Apostle Paul : his large and glorious 
mind rejoiced in the contemplation of the countless mani- 
festations of spiritual nature beneath w^iich he detected one 
and the same pervading Mind. Now let us look at this 
matter somewhat more closely. 

1. All real unity is manifold. Feelings in themselves 
identical find countless forms of expression ; for instance, 
sorrow is the same feeling throughout the human race ; but 
the Oriental prostrates himself upon the ground, throws dust 
upon his head, tears his garments, is not ashamed to break 
out into the most violent lamentations. In the north, we 
rule our grief in public ; sufier not even a quiver to be seen 
upon the lip or brow, and consider calmness as the appropri- 
ate expression of manly grief Nay, two sisters of different 
temperament will show their grief diversely ; one will love 
to dwell upon the theme of the qualities of the departed, the 
other feels it a sacred sorrow, on which the lips are sealed 
forever ; yet would it not be idle to ask which of them has 
the truest affection? Are they not both in their own Avay 
true ? In the same East, men take off their sandals in de- 
votion ; we exactly reverse the procedure, and uncover the 
head. The Oriental prostrates himself in the dust before 
his sovereign ; even before his God the Briton only kneels ; 
yet would it not again be idle to ask which is the essential 
and proper form of reverence ? Is not true reverence in all 
cases modified by the individualities of temperament and 
education ? Should we not say, in all these forms worketh 
one and the same spirit of reverence ? 

Again, in the world as God has made it, one law shows 



462 The Dispensatio7i of the spirit, 

itself under diverse, even opposite manifestations ; lead sinks 
in water, wood floats upon the surface. In former times 
men assigned these difi*erent results to different forces, laws, 
and gods. A knowledge of nature has demonstrated that 
they are expressions of one and the same law ; and the great 
difference between the educated and the uneducated man is 
this — the uneducated sees in this world nothing but an in- 
finite collection of unconnected facts — a broken, distorted, 
and fragmentary system, which his mind can by no means 
reduce to order. The educated man, in proportion to his 
education, sees the number of laws diminished — beholds in 
the manifold appearances of nature the expression of a few 
laws, by degrees fewer, till at last it becomes possible to his 
conception that they are all reducible to one, and that that 
which lies beneath the innumerable phenomena of nature is 
the One Spirit — God. 

2. All living unity is spiritual, not formal ; not sameness, 
but manifoldness. You may have a unity shown in identity 
of form ; but it is a lifeless unity. There is a sameness on 
the sea-beach — that unity which the ocean waves have pro- 
duced by curling and forcibly destroying the angularities of 
individual form, so that every stone presents the same mo- 
notony of aspect, and you must fracture each again in order 
to distinguish whether you hold in your hand a mass of flint 
or fragment of basalt. There is no life in unity such as 
this. 

But as soon as you arrive at a unity that is living, the 
form becomes more complex, and you search in vain for uni- 
formity. In the parts, it must be found, if found at all, in 
the sameness of the pervading life. The illustration given 
by the apostle is that of the human body — a higher unity, 
he says, by being composed of many members, than if every 
member were but a repetition of a single type. It is con- 
ceivable that God might have moulded such a form for hu- 
man life ; it is conceivable that every cause, instead of pro- 
ducing in different nerves a variety of sensations, should 
have affected every one in a mode precisely similar ; that 
instead of producing a sensation of sound — a sensation of 
color — a sensation of taste — the outward causes of nature, 
be they what they may, should have given but one unvaried 
feeling to every sense, and that the whole universe should 
have been light or sound. 

That would have been unity ; if sameness be unity ; but, 
says the apostle, "if the whole body were seeing, where 
were the hearing?" That uniformity would have been ir- 
reparable loss — the loss of every part that was merged into 



The Dispensation of the Spirit. 463 

the one. What is the body's unity ? Is it not this ? The 
unity of a living consciousness which marvellously animates 
every separate atom of the frame, and reduces each to the 
performance of a function fitted to the v^^elfare of the whole 
— its own, not another's : so that the inner spirit can say of 
the remotest, and in form most unlike, member, "That, too, 
is myself." 

3. None but a spiritual unity can preserve the rights both 
of the individual and the Church. All other systems of 
unity, except the apostolic, either sacrifice the Church to the 
individual, or the individual to the Church. 

Some have claimed the right of private judgment in such 
a way that every individual opinion becomes truth, and 
every utterance of private conscience right : thus the Church 
is sacrificed to the individual ; and the universal conscience, 
the common faith, becomes as nothing ; the spirits of the 
prophets are not subject to the prophets. Again, there are 
others, who, like the Church of Rome, would surrender the 
conscience of each man to the conscience of the Church, and 
coerce the particulars of faith into exact coincidence with a 
formal creed. Spiritual unity saves the right of both in 
God's system. The Church exists for the individual, just as 
truly as the individual for the Church. The Church is then 
most perfect when all its powders converge, and are concen- 
trated on the formation and protection of individual charac- 
ter ; and the individual is then most complete — that is, most 
a Christian — w^hen he has practically learned that his life is 
not his own, but owed to others—" that no man liveth to 
himself, and no man dieth to himself" 

Now, spiritual unity respects the sanctity of the individu- 
al conscience. How reverently the Apostle Paul considered 
its claims, and how tenderly ! When once it became a mat- 
ter of conscience, this was his principle laid down in matters 
of dispute : " Let every man be fully persuaded in his own 
mind." The belief of the whole w^orld can not make that 
thing true to me which to me seems false. The conscience 
of the whole world can not make a thing right to me, if I in 
my heart believe it wrong. You may coerce the conscience, 
you may control men's belief, and you may produce a unity 
by so doing ; but it is the unity of pebbles on the sea-shore 
— a lifeless identity of outward form with no cohesion be- 
tween the parts — a dead sea-beach on which nothing grows, 
and w^here the very sea-weed dies. 

Lastly, it respected the sanctity of individual character. 
Out of eight hundred millions of the human race, a few feat- 
ures diversify themselves into so many forms of counte* 



464 TJie Trinity, 

nance, that scarcely two could be mistaken for each other. 
There are no two leaves on the same tree alike ; nor two 
sides of the same leaf, unless you cut and kill it. There is a 
sacredness in individuality of character ; each one born into 
this w^orld is a fresh new soul intended by his Maker to de- 
velop himself in a new fresh way ; we are what we are ; w^e 
can not be truly other than ourselves. We reach perfection 
not by copying, much less by aiming at originality ; but by 
consistently and steadily w^orking out the life which is com- 
mon to us all, according to the character which God has 
given us. 

And thus will the Church of God be one at last — will pre- 
sent an unity like that of heaven. There is one universe, in 
which each separate star differs from another in glory ; one 
Church, in which a single Spirit, the Life of God, pervades 
each separate soul ; and just in proportion as that Life be- 
comes exalted does it enable every one to shine forth in the 
distinctness of his own separate individuality, like the stars 
of heaven. 



IV. 
THE TRIKITY. 

"And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your 
whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of 
our Lord Jesus Christ." — 1 Thess. v. 23. 

The knowledge of God is the blessedness of man. To 
know God, and to be known by him — to love God, and to be 
loved by Him — is the most precious treasure which this life 
has to give ; properly speaking, the only treasure ; properly 
speaking, the only knowledge ; for all knowledge is valuable 
only so far as it converges towards and ends in the knowl- 
edge of God, and enables us to acquaint ourselves with God, 
and be at peace w4th Him. The doctrine of the Trinity is 
the sum of all that knowledge which has as yet been gained 
by man. I say gained as yet. For w^e presume not to main- 
tain that in the ages w^hich are to come hereafter, our knowl- 
edge shall not be superseded by a higlier knowledge ; we 
presume not to say that in a state of existence future — yea 
even here upon this earth, at that period which is mysteri- 
ously referred to in Scripture as "the coming of the Son of 
Man" — there shall not be given to the soul an intellectual 
conception of the Almiglity, a vision of the Eternal, in com- 



The Trinity, 465 

parison with whose brightness and clearness our present 
knowledge of the Trinity shall be as rudimentary and as 
childlike as the knowledge of the Jew was in comparison 
with the knowledge of the Christian. 

Now the passage which I have undertaken to expound to- 
day is one in which the doctrine of the Trinity is brought 
into connection practically with the doctrine of our humani- 
ty. Before entering into it, brethren, let us lay down these 
two observations and duties for ourselves. In the first 
place, let us examine the doctrine of the Trinity ever in the 
spirit of charity. 

A clear statement of the deepest doctrine that man can 
know, and the intellectual conception of that doctrine, are 
by no means easy. We are puzzled and perplexed by 
words ; we fight respecting words. Quarrels are nearly al- 
ways verbal quarrels. Words lose their meaning in the 
course of time ; nay, the very words of the Athanasian creed 
which we read to-day mean not in this age the same thing 
which they meant in " ages past. Therefore it is possible 
that men, externally Trinitarians, may difier from each other 
though using the same words, as greatly as a Unitarian dif- 
fers from a Trinitarian. There may be found, in the same 
Church and in the same congregation, men holding all possi- 
ble shades of opinion, though agreeing externally and in 
words. 

I speak within the limit of my own experience when I say 
that persons have been known and heard to express the lan- 
guage of bitter condemnation respecting Unitarianism, who 
when examined and calmly required to draw out verbally 
the meaning of their own conceptions, have been proved to 
be holding all the time, unconsciously, the very doctrine of 
Sabellianism. And this doctrine is condemned by the 
Church as distinctly as that of Unitarianism. Therefore let 
us learn fi-om all this a large and catholic charity. There 
are in almost every congregation, themselves not knowing 
it, Trinitarians who are practically Tri-theists, worshipping 
three Gods; and Sabellians, or worshippers of one person 
under three different manifestations. To know God so that 
we may be said intellectually to appreciate Him, is blessed: 
to be unable to do so is a misfortune. Be content with your 
own blessedness, ii; comparison with others' misfortunes. 
Do not give to that misfortune the additional sting of illib- 
eral and unchristian vituperation. 

The next observation we have to lay down for ourselves 
is, that we should examine this doctrine in the spirit of mod- 
esty. There are those who are inclined to sneer at the THn- 



466 The Trinity, 

itarian ; those to whom the doctrine appears merely a con- 
tradiction — a puzzle — an entangled, labyrinthine enigma, in 
which there is no meaning whatever. But let all such re- 
member, that though the doctrine may appear to them ab- 
surd, because they have not the proper conception of it, some 
of the profoundest thinkers, and some of the holiest spirits 
among mankind, have believed in this doctrine — have clung 
to it as a matter of life or death. Let them be assured of 
this, that whether the doctrine be true or false, it is not nec- 
essarily a doctrine self-contradictory. Let them be assured 
of this, in all modesty, that such men never could have held 
it unless there was latent in the doctrine a deep truth — per- 
chance the truth of God. 

We pass on now to the consideration of this verse under 
the following divisions. In the first place, we shall view it 
as a triad in discord : " I pray God your whole spirit and 
soul and body be preserved blameless;" in the second place, 
as a Trinity in unity: "the God of peace sanctify you 
wholly." We take then, first of all, for our consideration the 
triad in discord : " I pray God your whole body and soul 
and spirit be preserved blameless." 

The apostle here divides human nature into a threefold 
division; and here we have to observe again the difticulty 
often experienced in understanding words. Thus words in 
the Athanasian creed have become obsolete, or lost their 
meaning: so that in the present day the words "person," 
" substance," " procession," " generation," to an ordinary 
person, mean almost nothing. So this language of the 
apostle, when rendered into English, shows no difierence 
whatever between " soul " and " spirit." We say, for instance, 
that the soul of a man has departed from him. We also say 
that the spirit of a man has departed from him. There is no 
distinct difference between the two ; but in the original two 
very different kinds of thoughts — two very different modes 
of conception — are represented by the two English words 
" soul " and " spirit." 

It is our business, therefore, in the first place, to under 
stand what is meant by this threefold division. When th»i 
apostle speaks of the body, what he means is the animal life 
— that which we share in common with beasts, birds, and 
reptiles ; for our life, my Christian brethi-en — our sensational 
existence — differs but little from that of the lower animals, 
There is the same external form, the same material in the 
blood-vessels, in the nerves, and in the muscular system. 
Nay, more than that, our appetites and instincts are alike, our 
lower pleasures like their lower pleasures, our lower pain like 



The Trinity, 467 

their lower pain, our life is supported by the same means, and 
our animal functions are almost indistinguishably the same. 

But, once more, the apostle speaks of what he calls the 
"soul." What the apostle meant by what is translated 
" soul," is the immortal part of man — the immaterial as 
distinguished from the material : those powers, in fact, which 
man has by nature — powers natural, which are yet to survive 
the grave. There is a distinction made in Scripture by our 
Lord between these two things. " Fear not," says He, " them 
who can kill the body ; but rather fear Him who can destroy 
both body and soul in hell." 

We have again to observe respecting this, that what the 
apostle called the " soul," is not simply distinguishable from 
the body, but also from the spirit ; and on that distinction I 
have already touched. By the soul the apostle means our 
powers natural — the powers which we have by nature. 
Herein is the .soul distinguishable from the spirit. In the 
Epistle to the Corinthians w^e read — " But the natural man 
receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God ; for they are 
foolishness unto him ; neither can he know them, because they 
are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth 
all things." Observe, there is a distinction drawn between 
the natural man and the spiritual. W^hat is there translated 
"natural" is derived from precisely the same word as that 
which is here translated "soul." So that we may read just 
as correctly: "The man under the dominion of the soul 
receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are 
foolishness unto him ; neither can he know them, because 
they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual 
judgeth all things." And again, the apostle, in the same 
Epistle to the Corinthians, writes: "That is not first which 
is spiritual, but that which is natural :" that is, the endow- 
ments of the soul precede the endowments of the spirit. 
You have the same truth in other j^laces. The powers that 
belong to the spirit were not the first developed ; but the 
powers which belong to the soul — that is, the powers of 
nature. Again in the same chapter, reference is made to 
the natural and spiritual body. "There is a natural body 
and there is a spiritual body." Literally, there is a body 
governed by the soul — that is, powers natural : and there is 
a body governed by the spirit — that is, higher nature. 

Let then this be borne in mind, that what the apostle 
calls " soul " is the same as that which he calls, in another 
place, the " natural man." These powers are divisible into 
two branches — the intellectual powers and the moral sense. 
The intellectual powers man has by nature. Man need not 



468 The Trinity. 

be regenerated in order to possess the power of reasoning, 
or in order to invent. The intellectual powers belong to 
what the apostle calls the " soul." The moral sense dis- 
tinguishes between right and wrong. The apostle tells us, 
in the Epistle to the Romans, that the heathen — manifestly 
natural men — had the "work of the law written in their 
hearts ; their conscience also bearing witness." 

The third division of which the apostle speaks, he calls 
the " spii'it ;" and by the spirit he means that life in man 
which, in his natural state, is in such an embryo condition 
that it can scarcely be said to exist at all — that which is 
called out into power and vitality by regeneration — the 
perfection of the powers of human nature. And you will 
observe, that it is not merely the instinctive life, nor the 
intellectual life, nor the moral life, but it is principally our 
nobler affections — that existence, that state of being which 
we call love. That is the department of - human nature 
which the apostle calls the spirit ; and accordingly, when the 
Spirit of God was given on the day of Pentecost, you will 
remember that another power of man was called out, differ- 
ing from what he had before. That Spirit granted on the 
day of Pentecost did subordinate to Himself, and was in- 
tended to subordinate to Himself, the will, the understand- 
ing, and the affection of man ; but you often find these spir- 
itual powers were distinguished from the natural powers, and 
existed without them. 

So in the highest state of religious life, we are told, men 
prayed in the spirit. Till the spirit has subordinated the 
understanding, the gift of God is not complete — has not 
don.e its -work. It is abundantly evident that a new life was 
called out. It was not merely the sharpening of the in- 
tellectual powers ; it was calling out powers of aspiration 
and love to God ; those affections which have in them some- 
thing boundless, that are not limited to this earth, but seek 
their completion in the mind of God Himself 

Now, what we have to say respecting this threefold state 
of man is, it is a state of discord. Let us take up a very 
simple, popular, everyday illustration. We hear it remarked 
frequently in conversation of a man, that if only his will 
were commensurate with his knowledge, he would be a great 
man. His knowledge is great — his powers are almost un- 
bounded ; he has gained knowledge from nearly every de- 
partment of science ; but somehow or other — you can not 
tell why — there is such an indecision, such a vacillation 
about the man, that he scarcely knows what to do, and, per- 
haps does nothing in this world. You find it remarked. 



The Trinity, 469 

respecting another class of men, that their will is strong, 
almost unbounded in its strength — they have iron wills, yet 
there is something so narrow in their conceptions, something 
so bounded in their views, so much of stagnation in their 
thoughts, so much of prejudice in all their opinions, that 
their will is prevenj;ed from being directed to any thing in a 
proper manner. Here is the discord in human nature. 
There is a distinction between the will and the under- 
standing. And sometimes a feeble will goes with a strong 
understanding, or a powerful will is found in connection 
with great feebleness or ignorance of the understanding. 

Let us, however, go into this more specially. The first 
cause of discord in this threefold state of man is the state in 
which the body is the ruler ; and this, my Christian brethren, 
you find most visibly developed in the uneducated and irre- 
ligious poor. I say uneducated and irreligious, because it is 
by no means education alone which can subordinate the flesh 
to the higher man. The religious uneducated poor man may 
be master of his lower passions ; but in the uneducated and 
irreligious poor man these show themselves in full force ; this 
discord, this want of unity, appears, as it were, in a magnified 
form. There is a strong man — health bursting, as it were, at 
every pore, with an athletic body ; but coarse, and rude, and 
intellectually weak — almost an animal. When you are re- 
garding the upper classes of society, you see less distinctly 
the absence of the spirit, unless you look with a spiritual eye. 
The coarseness has passed away, the rudeness is no longer 
seen : there is a refinement in the pleasure. But if you take 
the life led by the young men of our country — strong, ath- 
letic, healthy men — it is still the life of the flesh : the un- 
thinking and the unprincipled life in which there is as yet no 
higher life developed. It is a life which, in spite of its re- 
finement, the Bible condemns as the life of the sensualist. 

We pass on now to another state of discord — a state in 
which the soul is ruined. Brethren, this is a natural result — 
this is what might have been expected. The natural man 
gradually subordinates the flesh, the body, to the soul. It is 
natural in the development of individuals, it is natural in the 
development of society : in the development of individuals, 
because that childlike, infantine life which exists at first, 
and is almost entirely a life of appetites, gradually subsides. 
Higher wants, higher desires, loftier inclinations arise ; the 
passions of the young man gradually subside, and by degrees 
the more rational life comes : the life is changed — the pleas- 
ures of the senses are forsaken for those of the intellect. 

It appears natural, again, in the development of society. 



470 The Trinity^ 

Civilization will subordinate the flesh to the soul. In the 
savage state you find the life of the animal. Civilization is 
teaching a man, on the principle of this world, to subordinate 
his appetites ; to rule himself; and there comes a refinement, 
and a gentleness, and a polish, and an enjoyment of intellect- 
ual pleasures ; so that the man is no longer what the apostle 
calls a sensual man, but he becomes now what the apostle 
calls a natural man. We can see this character delineated in 
the Epistle to the Ephesians. " Then we were," says the 
apostle, " in our Gentile state, fulfilling the desires of the flesh 
and of the mind." Man naturally fulfills not merely the de- 
sires of the flesh, but the desires of the mind. "And were," 
says the apostle, " children of wrath." 

One of the saddest spectacles is the decay of the natural 
man before the work of the Spirit has been accomplished in 
him. When the savage dies — when a mere infant dies — when 
an animal dies — there is nothing that is appalling or depress- 
ing there; but when the high, the developed intellect — when 
the cultivated man comes to the last hours of life, and the 
memory becomes less powerful, and the judgment fails, and 
all that belongs to nature and to earth visibly perishes, and 
the higher life has not been yet developed, though it is des- 
tined to survive the grave forever — even the life of God — 
there is here ample cause for grief; and it is no wonder that 
the man of genius merely should shed tears at the idea of 
decaying life. 

We pass on to consider the Trinity in unity. All this is 
contained in that simple expression, " The God of peace." 
God is a God of unity. He makes one where before there 
were two. He is the God of peace, and therefore can make 
peace. N'ow this peace, according to the Trinitarian doctrine, 
consists in a threefold unity. Brethren, as we remarked, re- 
specting this first of all, the distinction in this Trinity is not 
a physical distinction, but a metaphysical one. The illustra- 
tions which are often given are illustrations drawn from ma- 
terial sources : if we take only those, we get into contradic- 
tion : for example, when we talk of personality, our idea is 
of a being bounded by space ; and then to say in this sense 
that three persons are one, and one is three, is simply con- 
tradictory and absurd. Remember that the doctrine of the 
Trinity is a metaphysical doctrine. It is a Trinity — a division 
in the mind of God. It is not three materials ; it is three per- 
sons in a sense we shall explain by-and-by. 

In the next place I will endeavor to explain the doctrine 
— not to prove it, but to show its rationality, and to explain 
what it is. 



The Trinity, 471 

The first illustration we endeavor to give in this is taken 
from the world of matter. We will take any material sub- 
stance : we find in that substance qualities •, we will say three 
qualities — color, shape and size. Color is not shape, shape is 
not size, size is not color. They are three distinct essences, 
three distinct qualities, and yet they all form one unity, one 
single conception, one idea — the idea, for example, of a tree. 

Now we will ascend from that into the immaterial world ; 
and here we come to something more distinct still. Hith- 
erto we have had but three qualities ; we now come to the 
mind of man — where we find something more than qual- 
ities. We will take three — the will, the affections, and the 
thoughts of man. His will is not his affections, neither are 
his affections his thoughts ; and it would be imperfect and 
incomplete to say that these are mere qualities in the man. 
They are separate consciousnesses — living consciousnesses — • 
as distinct and as really sundered as it is possible for three 
things to be, yet bound together by one unity of conscious- 
ness. Now we have distincter proof than even this that 
these things are three. The anatomist can tell you that the 
localities of these powers are different. He can point out the 
seat of the nerve of sensation ; he can localize the feeling of 
affection ; he can point to a nerve and say, "There resides 
the locality of thought." 

There are three distinct localities for three distinct quali- 
ties, personalities, consciousnesses ; yet all these three are 
one. 

Once more, we will give proof even beyond all that. The 
act that a man does is done by one particular part of that 
man. You may say it was a work of his genius, or of his 
fancy ; it may have been a manifestation of his love, or an 
exhibition of his courage ; yet that work was the work of the 
whole .man : his courage, his intellect, his habits of persever- 
ance, all helped towards the completion of that single work 
Just in this way certain special works are attributed to cer- 
tain personalities of the Deity ; the work of redemption being 
attributed to one, the work of sanctification to another. And 
yet just as the whole man was engaged in doing that work, 
60 does the whole Deity perform that work which is at- 
tributed to one essential. 

Once more, let us remember that principle which we ex- 
pounded last Sunday, that it is the law of being that in pro- 
portion as you rise from lower to higher life, the parts are 
more distinctly developed, while yet the unity becomes more 
entire. You find, for example, in the lowest forms of animal 
life one organ performs several functions, one organ being at 



472 The Trinity, 

the same time heart and brain and blood-vessels. But when 
you come to man, you find all these various functions exist* 
ing in different organs, and every organ m(Dre distinctly de- 
veloped ; and yet the unity of a man is a higher unity than 
that of a limpet. When you come from the material world 
to the world immaterial, you find that the more society is 
cultivated, the more man is cultivated, the more marvellous 
is the power of developing distinct powers. In the savage 
life it is almost all one feeling ; but in proportion as the 
higher education advances and the higher life appears, every 
power and faculty develops and distinguishes itself and be- 
comes distinct and separate. And yet just in proportion as 
in a nation every part is distinct, the unity is greater, and 
just in proportion as in an individual every power is most 
complete, and stands out most distinct, just in that propor- 
tion has the man reached the entireness of his humanity. 

Now, brethren, we apply all this to the mind of God. The 
Trinitarian maintains against the Unitarian and the Sabellian, 
that the higher you ascend in the scale of being, the more dis- 
tinct are the consciousnesses, and that the law of unity im- 
plies and demands a manifold unity. The doctrine of Sabel- 
lianism, for example, is this : that God is but one essence — 
but one person under different manifestations ; and that when 
He made the world He was called the Father, when He re- 
deemed the world He was called the Son, and when he sanc- 
tified the world He was called the Holy Ghost. The Sabel- 
lian and the Unitarian maintain that the unity of God con- 
sists simply in a unity of person, and in opposition to this does 
the Trinitarian maintain that grandness, either in man or in 
God, must be a unity of manifoldness. 

But we will enter into this more deeply. The first power 
of consciousness in which God is made known to us is as the 
Father, the Author of our being. It is written, " In Him we 
live, and move, and have our being." He is the Author of 
all life. In this sense He is not merely our Father as Chris- 
tians, but the Father of mankind ; and not merely the Fa- 
ther of mankind, but the Father of creation ; and in this 
way the sublime language of the prophets may be taken as 
true literally, " The morning stars sang together, and all the 
sons of God shouted for joy ;" and the language of the can- 
ticle which belongs to our morning service, " the deeps, the 
fountains, the wells," all unite in one hymn of praise, one ev- 
erlasting hallelujah to God the Father, the Author of their 
being. In this respect, simply as the Author of life, merely 
as the Supreme Being, God has reference to us in relation to 
the body. He is the Lord of life : in Him w^e live, and 



The Trinity, 473 

move, and have our being. In this respect God to us is as 
law — as the collected laws of the universe ; and therefore to 
oflfend against law, and bring down the result of transgress- 
ing law, is said in Scripture language, because applied to a 
person, to be provoking the wrath of God the Father. 

In the next place, the second way through which the per- 
sonality and consciousness of God has been revealed to us is 
as the Son. Brethren, we see in all those writers who have 
treated of the Trinity, that much stress is laid upon this 
eternal generation of the Son, the everlasting sonship. It is 
this which we have in the creed — the creed Avhich was read 
to-day — " God, of the substance of the Father, begotten be- 
fore the worlds ;" and, again, in the Nicene creed, that ex- 
Eression, which is so often wrongly read, " God of God, 
light of Light, very God of very God," means absolutely 
nothing. There are two statements made there. The first 
is this, " The Son was God :" the second is this, " The Son 
was — of God," showing his derivation. And in that, breth- 
ren, we have one of the deepest and most blessed truths of 
revelation. The Unitarian maintains a divine humanity — a 
blessed, blessed truth. There is a truth more blessed still — 
the humanity of Deity. Before the world was, there was 
that in the mind of God which we may call the humanity of 
His Divinity. It is called in Scripture the Word : the Son : 
the Form of God. It is in virtue of this that we have a right 
to attribute to Him our own feelings ; it is in virtue of this 
that Scripture speaks of His wisdom. His justice, His love. 
Love in God is what love is in man; justice in God is what 
justice is in man; creative power in God is what creative 
power is in man ; indignation in God is that which indigna- 
tion is in man, barring only this, that the one is emotional, 
but the other is calm, and pure, and everlastingly still. It 
is through this humanity in the mind of God, if I may dare 
so to speak of Deity, that a revelation became possible to 
man. It was the Word that was made flesh ; it was the 
Word that manifested itself to man. It is in virtue of the 
connection between God and man, that God made man in 
His own image ; that through a long line of prophets the hu- 
man truth of God could be made known to man, till it came 
forth developed most entirely and at large in the incarnation 
of the Redeemer. Xow in this respect, it will be observed 
that God stands connected with us in relation to the soul as 
" the Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the 
world." 

Once more : there is a nearer, a closer, and a more enduring 
relation in which God stands to us — that is, the relation of 



474 '^^^ Trinity, 

the Spirit. It is to the writings of St. John that we have to 
turn especially, if we desire to know the doctrines of the 
Spirit. You will remember the strange way in which he 
speaks of God. It would almost seem as if the external God 
has disappeared to him ; nay, as if an external Christ were 
almost forgotten, because the internal Christ has been formed. 
He speaks of God as kindred with us ; he speaks of Christ as 
Christ in us ; and " if we love one another," he says, " God 
dwelleth in us." If a man keep the commandments, " God 
dwelleth in him, and he in God." So that the spiritual man- 
ifestation of God to us is that whereby He blends Himself 
with the soul of man. 

These, then, my Christian brethren, are the three con- 
sciousnesses by which He becomes known to us. Three, we 
said, known to us. We do not dare to limit God ; we do not 
presume to say that there are in God only three personali- 
ties, only three consciousnesses : all that we dare presume to 
say is this, that there are three in reference to us, and only 
three ; that a fourth there is not ; that, perchance, in the 
present state a fourth you can not add to these — Creator, 
Redeemer, Sanctifier. 

Lastly, let us turn to the relation which the Trinity in 
unity bears to the triad in discord. It is intended for the 
entireness of our sanctification : " the very God of peace 
sanctify you wholly." Brethren, we dwell upon that expres- 
sion " lohollyy There is this difference between Christianity 
and every other system : Christianity proposes to ennoble 
the whole man ; every other system subordinates parts to 
parts. Christianity does not despise the intellect, but it 
does not exalt the intellect in a one-sided way : it only 
dwells with emphasis on the third and highest part of man 
— his spiritual affections ; and these it maintains are the 
chief and real seat of everlasting life, intended to subordi- 
nate the other to themselves. 

Asceticism would crush the natural affections, destroy the 
appetites. Asceticism feels that there is a conflict between 
the flesh and the spirit, and it would put an end to that con- 
flict ; it would bring back unity by the excision of all our 
natural appetites, and all the desires and feelings which we 
have by nature. But when the Apostle Paul comes forward 
to proclaim the will of God, he says it is not by the crushing 
of the body but by the sanctification of the body : " I pray 
God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved 
blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." 

In this, my Christian brethren, there is one of the deepest 
of all truths. Does a man feel himself the slave and the vie- 



The Trinity, 475 

tim of his lower passions ? Let not that man hope to subdue 
them merely by struggling against them. Let him not by 
fasting, by austerity, by any earthly rule that he can con- 
ceive, expect to subdue the flesh. The more he thinks of his 
vile and lower feelings, the more will they be brought into 
distinctness, and therefore into power; the more hopelessly 
will he become their victim. The only way in which a man 
can subdue the flesh is not by the extinction of those feel- 
ings, but by the elevation of their character. Let there be 
added to that character, sublimity of aim, purity of affection ; 
let there be given grandeur, spiritual nobleness; and then, 
just as the strengthening of the whole constitution of the 
body makes any particular and local affection disappear, so 
by degrees, by the raising of the character, do these lower 
affections become, not extinguished or destroyed by excision, 
but ennobled by a new and loftier spirit breathed through 
them. 

This is the account given by the apostle. He speaks of 
the conflict between the flesh and the spirit. And his reme- 
dy is to give vigor to the higher, rather than to struggle 
with the lower. " This I say, then, Walk in the spirit, and 
ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh." 

Once more : the apostle differs from the w^orld in this, 
that the world would restore this unity and sanctify man 
simply from the soul. It is this which civilization pretends 
to effect. We hear much in these modern days of " the 
progress of humanity." We hear of man's invention, of 
man's increase of knowledge; and it would seem in all this, 
as if man were necessarily becoming better. Brethren, it al- 
w^ays must be the case in that state in which God is looked 
upon as the Supreme Being merely, where. the intellect of 
man is supposed to be the chief thing — that which makes 
him most kindred to his Maker. 

The doctrine of Christianity is this — that unity of all this 
discord must be made. Man is to be made one with God, 
not by soaring intellect, but by lowly love. It is the Spirit 
which guides him to all truth ; not merely by rendering 
more acute the reasoning powers, but by convincing of sin, 
by humbling the man. It is the graces of the Spirit which 
harmonize the man, and make him one; and that is the end, 
and aim, and object of all the Gospel : the entireness of sanc- 
tification to produce a perfectly developed man. 

Most of us in this world are monsters, with some part of 
our being bearing the development of a giant and others 
show^ing the proportions of a dwarf: a feeble, dwarfish will 
— mighty, full-blown passions ; and therefore it is that there 



4 7 6 Absotu tion. 

is to be visible through the Trinity in us, a noble manifold 
unity ; and when the triune power of God shall so have 
done its work on the entireness of our humanity, that the 
body, soul, and spirit have been sanctified, then shall there 
be exhibited, and only then, a perfect affection in man to his 
Maker, and body, soul, and spirit shall exhibit a Trinity Id 
unity. 



V. 

ABSOLUTION. 

"And the scribes and the Pharisees began to reason, saying, Who is this 
which speaketh blasphemies? Who can forgive sins, but God alone?" — 
Luke V. 21. 

There are questions which having been again and again 
settled, still from time to time present themselves for re-so- 
lution ; errors which having been refuted, and cut up by the 
roots, re-appear in the next century as fresh and vigorous as 
ever. Like the fabled monsters of old, from whose dissever- 
ed neck the blood sprung forth and formed fresh heads, mul- 
tiplied and indestructible ; or like the weeds, which, extir- 
pated in one place, sprout forth vigorously in another. 

In every such case it may be taken for gi-anted that the 
root of the matter has not been reached ; the error has been 
exposed, but the truth which lay at the bottom of the error 
has not been disengaged. Every error is connected with a 
truth ; the truth being perennial, springs up again as often 
as circumstances foster it, or call for it, and the seeds of er- 
ror which lay about the roots spring up again in the form of 
weeds, as before. 

A popular illustration of this may be found in the belief 
in the appearance of the spirits of the departed. You may 
examine the evidence for every such alleged apparition ; you 
may demonstrate the improbability ; you may reduce it to 
an impossibility ; still the popular feeling will remain ; and 
there is a lurking superstition even among the enlightened, 
which in the midst of professions of incredulity shows itself 
in a readiness to believe the wildest new tale, if it possess 
but the semblance of an authentication. Now two truths 
lie at the rr>ot of this superstition. The first is the re- 
ality of the spirit-world and the instinctive belief in it. The 
second is the fact that there are certain states of health in 
which the eye creates the objects which it perceives. The 



Absolution. 477 

death-blow to such superstition is only struck when we have 
not only proved that men have been deceived, but shown be- 
sides how they came to be deceived ; when science has ex- 
plained the optical delusion, and shown the physiological 
state in which such apparitions become visible. Ridicule 
will not do it. Disproof will not do it. So long as men feel 
that there is a spirit-world, and so long as to some the im- 
pression is vivid that they have seen it, you spend your 
rhetoric in vain. You must show the truth that lies below 
the error. 

The principle we gain from this is, that you can not over- 
throw falsehood by negation, but by establishing the antag- 
onistic truth. The refutation which is to last must be posi- 
tive, not negative. It is an endless work to be uprooting 
weeds : plant the ground with wholesome vegetation, and 
then the juices which would have otherwise fed rankness 
will pour themselves into a more vigorous growth; the dwin- 
dled weeds will be easily raked out then. It is an endless 
task to be refuting error. Plant truth, and the error will 
pine away. 

The instance to which all this is preliminary, is the perti- 
nacious hold which the belief in a human absolving power 
retains upon mankind. There has perhaps never yet been 
known a religion without such a belief There is not a sav- 
age in the islands of the South Pacific who does not believe 
that his priest can shield him from the consequences of sin. 
There was not a people in antiquity who had not dispensers 
of Divine favor. That same belief passed from Paganism 
into Romanism. It was exposed at the period of the Refor- 
mation. A mighty reaction was felt against it throughout 
Europe. Apparently the whole idea of human priesthood 
was proved, once and forever, to be baseless ; human media- 
tion, in every possible form, was vehemently controverted ; 
men were referred back to God as the sole Absolver. 

Yet now again, three centuries after, the belief is still as 
strong as ever. That which we thought dead is alive again, 
and not likely, it seems, to die. Recent revelations have 
shown that confession is daily made in the country whose 
natural manners are most against it ; private absolution ask- 
ed by English men and given by English priests. A fact so 
significant might lead us well to pause, and ask ourselves 
whether we have found the true answer to the question. 
The negation we have got, the vehement denial; we are 
weary of its reiteration : but the positive truth which lies at 
the bottom of this craving — where is that ? 

Parliaments and pulpits, senators and clergymen, have 



47^ Absolution. 

vied with each other in the vehemence with which they de* 
clare absolution un-Christian, un-English. All that is most 
abominable in the confessional has been with unsparing and 
irreverent indelicacy forced before the public mind. Still, 
men and women, whose holiness and purity are beyond slan- 
der's reach, come and crave assurance of forgiveness. How 
shall we reply to such men? Shall we say, "Who is this 
that speaketh blasphemies ? who can forgive sins, but God 
only ?" Shall we say it is all blasphemy ; an impious intru- 
sion upon the prerogatives of the One Absolver ? Well, we 
may ; it is popular to say we ought ; but you will observe, 
if we speak so, we do no more than the Pharisees in this 
text : we establish a negation ; but a negation is only one 
side of truth. 

Moreover, we have been asserting that for three hundred 
years, with small fruits. We keep asserting, Man can not 
give assurance that sin is pardoned ; in other Avords, man 
can not absolve : but still the heart craves human assurance 
of forgiveness. What truth have we got to supply that 
craving ? We shall therefore rather try to fathom the deeps 
of the positive truth which is the true reply to the error ; we 
shall try to see w^hether there is not a real answer to the 
craving contained in the Redeemer's words, " The Son of 
Man hath power on earth to forgive sins." What power is 
there in human forgiveness ? What does absolution mean 
in the lips of a son of man ? These are our questions for to- 
day. We shall consider two points. 

I. The impotency of the negation. 
n. The power of the positive truth. 

The Pharisees denied the efficacy of human absolution : 
they said, " None can forgive sins, but God only :" that was 
a negation. What did they effect, by their system of nega- 
tions ? They conferred no peace ; they produced no holi- 
ness. It would be a great error to suppose that the Phari- 
sees were hypocrites in the ordinary sense of the term — that 
is, pretending to be anxious about religion when they knew 
that they felt no anxiety. They were anxious, in their way. 
Tliey heard a startling free announcement of forgiveness by 
a man. To them it appeared license given to sin. If this 
new teacher, this upstart — in their own language, " this fel- 
low — of whom every man knew whence he was," were to go 
about the length and breadth of the land, telling sinners to 
be at peace ; telling them to forget the past, and to work on- 
wards ; bidding men's consciences be at rest ; and command- 
ing them not lo fear the God whom they had offended^ but 



Absolution. 479 

lo imjist in Him — what would become of morality and relig- 
ion ? This presumptuous Absolver would make men careless 
about both. If the indispensable safeguards of penalty were 
removed, what remained to restrain men from sm ? 

For the Pharisees had no notion of any other goodness 
than that which is restrained ; they could conceive no good- 
ness free, but only that which is produced by rewards and 
punishments — law-goodness, law-righteousness ; to dread 
God, not to love and trust Him, was their conception of re- 
ligion. And this, indeed, is the ordinary conception of re- 
ligion — the ordinary meaning implied to most minds by the 
word religion. The word religion means, by derivation, re- 
striction or obligation — obligation to do, obligation to avoid. 
And this is the negative system of the Pharisees — scrupulous 
avoidance of evil rather than positive and free pursuit of ex- 
cellence. Such a system never produced any thing but bar- 
ren denial. ''''This is wrong;" ''''that is heresy^" ''''that is 
dangerous." 

Tliere was another class of men who denied human power 
of absolution. They w^ere called Scribes or writers — ped- 
ants, men of ponderous learning and accurate definitions; 
from being mere transcribers of the law, they had risen to 
be its expounders. They could define the exact number of 
yards that might be travelled on the sabbath-day without 
infringement of the law ; they could decide, according to the 
most approved theology, the respective importance of each 
duty ; they would tell you, authoritatively, which was the 
great commandment of the law. The Scribe is a man who 
turns religion into etiquette : his idea of God is that of a 
monarch, transgression against w^hom is an ofiense against 
statute law, and he, the Scribe, is there to explain the pre- 
scribed conditions upon which the ofiense may be expiated ; 
he has no idea of admission to the sovereign's presence, ex- 
cept by compliance with certain formalities which the Scribe 
is commissioned to declare. 

There are therefore Scribes in all ages — Romish Scribes, 
who distinguish between venial and mortal sin, and appor- 
tion to each its appointed penance and absolution. There 
are Protestant Scribes, who have no idea of God but as an 
incensed judge, and prescribe certain methods of appeasing 
Him — a certain price, in consideration of which He is willing 
to sell forgiveness ; men who accurately draw the distinc- 
tion between the difilerent kinds of faith — faith historical and 
faith saving ; who bewilder and confuse all natural feeling ; 
who treat the natural love of relations as if it were an idola- 
try as great as bowing down to mammon ; who make intel* 



480 Absolution, 

ligible distinction between the work that may and the work 
that may not be done on the sabbath-day ; who send you 
into a perilous consideration of the workings of your own 
feelings, and the examination of your spiritual experiences, 
to ascertain whether you have the feelings which give you a 
right to call God a Father. They hate the Romish Scribe 
as much as the Jewish Scribe hated the Samaritan and called 
him heretic. But in their way they are true to the spirit of 
the Scribe. 

Now the result of this is fourfold. Among the tender- 
minded, despondency ; among the vainer, spiritual pride ; in 
the case of the slavish, superstition ; with the hard-minded, 
infidelity. Ponder it well, and you will find these four 
things rife amongst us : despondency, spiritual pride, super- 
stition, and infidelity. In this way we have been going on 
for many years. In the midst of all this, at last we are in- 
formed that the confessional is at work again ; whereupon 
astonishment and indignation are loudly expressed. It is 
not to be borne that the priests of the Church of England 
should confess and absolve in private. Yet it is only what 
might have been expected. 

With our Evangelicalism, Tractarianism, Scribeism, Phar- 
isaism, we have ceased to front the living fact — we are as 
zealous as Scribes and Pharisees ever were for negatives; 
but in the mean time human nature, oppressed and over- 
borne, gasping for breath, demands something real and living. 
It can not live on controversies. It can not be fed on pro- 
tests against heresy, however vehement. We are trying 
who can protest loudest. Every book, every journal, rings 
with warnings. "Beware!" is written upon every thing. 
Beware of Rome; bew^are of Geneva; beware of Germany; 
some danger on every side ; Satan everywhere — God no- 
where; everywhere some man to be shunned or dreaded — 
nowhere one to be loved freely and without suspicion. Is it 
any wonder if men and women, in the midst of negations, 
cry, "Ye warn me from the error, but who will guide me 
into truth ? I want guidance. I am sinful, full of evil ! I 
want forgiveness. Absolve me ; tell me that I am pardon- 
ed ; help me to believe it. Your quarrels do not help me ; 
if you can not do tliat^ it matters little what you can do. 
You have restricted God's love, and narrowed the path to 
heaven ; you have hampered religion with so many mysteri- 
ous questions and quibbles that I can not find the way to 
God; you have terrified me with so many snares and pitfalls 
on every side, that I dare not tread at all. Give me peace ; 
give me human guidance: I want a human arm to lean on." 



Absolution, 481 

This is a cry, I believe, becoming daily more passionate 
R,nd more common. And no wonder that all our information, 
public and private, is to the same effect — that the recent 
converts have found peace in Rome; for the secret of the 
power of Rome is this — that she grounds her teaching, not 
on variable feelings and correct opinions, but on facts. God 
is not a highly probable God, but 2, fact. God's forgiveness 
is not a feeling, but a fact ; and a material symbolic fact is 
the witness of the invisible one. Rome puts forward her ab- 
solution — her false, priestly, magical absolution — a visible 
fact, as a witness of the invisible. And her perversion pre- 
vails because founded on a truth. 

n. The power of the positive truth. 

Is it any wonder, if, taught on every side distrust of man, 
the heart should by a violent reaction, and by an extrava- 
gant confidence in a priest, proclaim that its normal, natural 
state is not distrust, but trust ? 

What is forgiveness ? It is God reconciled to us. What 
is absolution ? It is the authoritative declaration that God 
is reconciled. Authoritative: that is a real power of con- 
veying a sense and feeling of forgiveness. It is the power 
of the Son of Man on earth to forgive sins. It is man, God's 
image, representing, by his forgiveness on earth, God's for- 
giveness in heaven. 

Now distinguish God's forgiveness of sin from an arresting 
of the consequence of sin. When God forgives a sin it does 
not follow that He stops its consequences: for example, 
when He forgives the intemperate man whose health is 
ruined, forgiveness does not restore his health. Divine par- 
don does not interfere with the laws of the universe, for it is 
itself one of those laws. It is a law that penalty follows 
transgression. Forgiveness will not save from penalty ; but 
it alters the feelings with which the penalty is accepted. 
Pain inflicted with a surgeon's knife for a man's o^ood is as 
keen as that which results from the knife of the torturer ; but 
in the one case it is calmly borne because remedial — in the 
other it exasperates because it is felt to be intended by ma- 
levolence. So with the difference between suffering which 
comes from a sin which Ave hope God has forgiven, and suf- 
fering which seems to fall hot from the hand of an angry 
God. It is a fearful truth, that, so far as we know at least, 
the consequences of an act are connected with it indissolubly. 
Forgiveness does not arrest them ; but by producing softness 
and grateful penitence, it transforms them into blessings. 
This is God's forgiveness ; and absolution is the conveyance 
Q 



482 Absolution, 

to the conscience of the conviction of forgiveness : to absolve 
is to free — to comfort by strengthening — to afford repose 
from fear. 

Now it was the way of the Redeemer to emancipate from 
sin by the freeness of absolution. The dying thief, an hour 
before a blasphemer, was nnconditionally assured ; the mo- 
ment the sinner's feelings changed towards God, He pro- 
claimed that God was reconciled to him: "This day thou 
shalt be with me in Paradise." And hence, speaking human- 
ly, hence, from this absolving tone and spirit, came His won- 
drous and unparalleled power with sinful, erring hearts; 
hence the life and fresh impulse which He imparted to the 
being and experience to those with whom He dealt. Hence 
the maniac, freed from the legion, sat at His feet, clothed, 
and in his right mind. Hence the outcast woman, whom 
human scorn would have hardened into brazen effrontery, 
hearing an unwonted voice of human sympathy, " washed 
His feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hairs of 
her head." 

And this is what we have forgotten: we have not yet 
learned to trust the power of redeeming love ; we do not be- 
lieve in the omnipotence of grace, and the might of an ap- 
peal to the better parts, and not the slavish parts of human 
nature. Settle it in your minds, the absolving power is the 
central secret of the Gospel. Salvation is unconditional ; not 
an offer, but a gift; not clogged with conditions, but free as 
the air we breathe. God welcomes back the prodigal. God 
loves without money and without price. To this men reply 
gravely, It is dangerous to speak thus ; it is perilous to dis- 
pense with the safeguards of restriction. Law ! law ! there 
is nothing like law — a salutary fear — for making men holy. 
Oh blind Pharisee ! had you ever known the spring, the life 
which comes from feeling free^ the gush of gratitude with 
which the heart springs to duty when all chains are shat- 
tered, and it stands fearless and free in the light, and in the 
love of God — you would understand that a large trusting 
charity, which can throw itself on the better and more gen' 
erous impulses of a laden spirit, is the safest as well as the 
most beautiful means of securing obedience. 

So far, however, there will not be much objection to the 
doctrine: it will be admitted that absolution is true in the 
lips of Christ, because of His Divinity. It will be said He 
was God, and God speaking on earth is the same thing as 
God speaking in heaven. No, my brethren, it is not the 
same thing. Christ forgiving on earth is a new truth added 
to that of God's forgiving in heaven. It is not the samft 



Absolution. 483 

truth. The one is forgiveness by Deity; the other is the 
declaration of forgiveness by humanity. He bade the pal- 
sied man walk, that they might know that " the Son of Man 
hath power on earth to forgive sins." Therefore we proceed 
a step farther. The same power He delegated to His Church 
which He had exercised Himself " Whosesoever sins ye re- 
mit, they are remitted." Now perhaps it will be replied to 
this, that that promise belongs to the apostles ; that they 
were supernaturally gifted to distinguish genuine from 
feigned repentance ; to absolve, therefore, was their natural 
prerogative, but that we have no right to say it extends be- 
yond the apostles. 

We therefore bring the question to a point by referring to 
an instance in which an apostle did absolve. Let us ex- 
amine whether St. Paul confined the prerogative to himself. 
" To whom ye forgive any thing, I forgive also : for to 
whom I forgave any thing for your sakes, forgave I it in the 
person of Christ." 

Observe now : it is quite true here that the apostle ab- 
solved a man whose excommunication he had formerly re- 
quired: but he absolved him because the congregation ab- 
solved him ; not as a plenipotentiary supernaturally gifted 
to convey a mysterious benefit, but as himself an organ and 
representative of the Church. The power of absolution 
therefore belonged to the Church, and to the apostle through 
the Church. It was a power belonging to all Christians : to 
the apostle, because he was a Christian, not because he was 
an apostle. A priestly power, no doubt, because Christ has 
made all Christians kings and priests. 

Now let us turn again, with this added light, to examine 
the meaning of that expression, " The Son of Man hath pow- 
er on earth to forgive sins." Mark that form of words — not 
Christ as God, but Christ as Son of Man. It was manifestly 
said by Him, not solely as Divine, but rather as human, as 
the Son of Man ; that is, as man. For we may take it as a 
rule: when Christ calls himself Son of Man, He is asserting 
His humanity. It was said by the High-Priest of humanity 
in the name of the race. It was said on the principle that 
human nature is the reflection of God's nature : that human 
love is the image of God's love ; and that human forgiveness 
is the type and assurance of Divine forgiveness. 

In Christ humanity was the perfect type of Deity, and 
therefore Christ's absolution was always the exact measure 
and countei-part of God's forgiveness. Herein lies the deep 
truth of the doctrine of His eternal priesthood — the Eternal 
Son — the humanity of the being of God — the ever-human 



d.84 Absolution, 

mind of God. The Absolver ever lives. The Father judgeth 
no man, but hath committed all judgment to the Son — hath 
given Him authority to execute judgment also because He 
is the Son of Man. 

But further than this. In a subordinate, because less per- 
fect degree, the forgiveness of a man as man carries with it 
an absolving power. Who has not felt the load taken from 
his mind when the hidden guilt over which he had brooded 
long has been acknowledged, and met by forgiving human 
sympathy, especially at a time when he expected to be treat- 
ed with coldness and reproof? Who has not felt how such 
a moment was to him the dawn of a better hope, and how 
the merciful judgment of some wise and good human being 
seemed to be the type and the assurance of God's pardon, 
making it credible. Unconsciously, it may be, but still in 
substance really, I believe some such reasoning as this goes 
on in the whispers of the heart — "He loves me, and has com- 
passion on me — will not God forgive ? He, this man, made 
in God's image, does not think my case hopeless. Well, 
then, in the larger love of God it is not hopeless." Thus, 
and only thus, can we understand the ecclesiastical a.ct. Ab- 
solution, the prerogative of our humanity, is represented by 
a formal act of the Church. 

Much controversy and angry bitterness has been spent on 
the absolution put by the Church of England into the lips 
of her ministers — I can not think with justice — if we try to 
get at the root of these words of Christ. The priest pro- 
claims forgiveness authoritatively as the organ of the con- 
gregation — as the voice of the Church, in the name of man 
and God. For human nature represents God. The Church 
represents what human nature is and ought to be. The min- 
ister represents the Church. He speaks therefore in the 
name of our Godlike human nature. He declares a Divine 
fact ; he does not create it. There is no magic in his absolu- 
tion : he can no more forgive whom God has not forgiven, 
by the formula of absolution, or reverse the pardon of him 
whom God has absolved by a formula of excommunication, 
than he can transfer a demon into an angel by the formula 
of baptism. He declares what every one has a right to de- 
clare, and ought to declare by his lips and by his conduct : 
but being a minister, he declares it authoritatively in the 
name of every Christian who by his Christianity is a priest 
to God ; he specializes what is universal ; as in baptism, he 
seals the universal Sonship on the individual by name, say- 
ing, "The Sonship with which Christ has redeemed all men, 
I hereby proclaim for this child ;" so by absolution he spe- 



Absolution. 485 

* 

cializes the universal fact of the love of God to those who 
are listening then and there, saying, " The love of God the 
Absolver I authoritatively joroclaim to be yoursP 

In the service for the visitation of the sick, the Church of 
England puts into the lips of her ministers words quite un 
conditional: "I absolve thee from all thy sins." You know 
that passage is constantly objected to as Romish and super- 
stitious, I would not give up that precious passage. I love 
the Church of England, because she has dared to claim her 
inheritance — because she has courage to assert herself as 
what she ought to be — God's representative on earth. She 
says to her minister. Stand there before a darkened spirit, on 
whom the shadows of death have begun to fall : in human 
flesh and blood representing the Invisible — with words of 
human love making credible the love eternal. Say boldly, I 
am here to declare not a perhaps, hut a fact. I forgive thee 
in the name of humanity. And so far as humanity represents 
Deity, that forgiveness is a type of God's. She does not put 
into her ministers' lips words of incantation. He can not 
bless whom God has not blessed — he can not curse whom 
God has not cursed. If the Son of Absolution be there, his 
absolution will rest. If you have ever tried the slow and 
apparently hopeless task of ministering to a heart diseased, 
and binding up the wound that ^c^7^ bleed afresh, to which no 
assurances can give comfort, because they are not authorita- 
tive, it must have crossed your mind that such a power as 
that which the Church of England claims, if it were believed, 
is exactly the remedy you want. You must have felt that 
even the formula of the Church of Rome would be a blessed 
power to exercise, could it but once be accepted as a pledge 
that all the past was obliterated, and that from that moment 
a free untainted future lay before the soul — you must have 
felt that ; you must have wished you had dared to say it. 
My whole spirit has absolved my erring brother. Is God 
less merciful than I? Can I — dare I — say or think it condi- 
tionally ? Dare I say, I hope ? May I not, must I not, say, 
I know God has forgiven you? 

Every man whose heart has truly bled over another's sin, 
and watched another's remorse with pangs as sharp as if the ^ 
crime had been his own, has said it. Every parent has said 
it who ever received back a repentant daughter, and opened 
out for her a new hope for life. Every mother has said it 
who ever, by her hope against hope for some profligate, pro- 
tested for a love deeper and wider than that of society. 
Every man has said it who forgave a deep wrong. See, then, 
why and how the Church absolves. She only exercises tha5 



486 Absolution, 

power whicli belongs to every son of man. If society were 
Christian — if society, by its forgiveness and its exclusion, 
truly represented the mind of God — there would be no ne- 
cessity for a Church to speak ; but the absolution of society 
and the world does not represent by any means God's for« 
giveness. Society absolves those whom God has not ab- 
solved — the proud, the selfish, the strong, the seducer ; so- 
ciety refuses return and acceptance to the seduced, the frail, 
and the sad penitent whom God has accepted ; therefore it 
is necessary that a selected body, through its appointed or- 
gans, should do in the name of man what man, as such, does 
not. The Church is the ideal of humanity. It represents 
what God intended man to be — what man is in God's sight 
as beheld in Christ by Him ; and the minister of the Church 
speaks as the representative of that ideal humanity. Church 
absolution is an eternal protest, in the name of God the Ab- 
solver, against the false judgments of society. 

One thing more : beware of making this a dead formula. 
If absolution be not a living truth it becomes a monstrous 
falsehood ; if you take absolution as a mystical gift conveyed 
to an individual man called a priest, and mysteriously effica- 
cious in his lips, and his alone, you petrify a truth into death 
and unreality. I have been striving to show that absolution 
is not a Church figment, invented by priestcraft, but a living, 
blessed, human power. It is a power delegated to you and 
to me, and just so far as we exercise it lovingly and wisely, 
in our lives, and with our lips, we help men away from sin : 
just so far as we do not exercise it, or exercise it falsely, we 
drive men to Rome. For if the heart can not have a truth 
it will take a counterfeit of truth. By every magnanimous 
act, by every free forgiveness with which a pure man for- 
gives, or pleads for mercy, or assures the penitent, he pro- 
claims this truth, that " the Son of Man hath power on earth 
to forgive sins " — he exhibits the priestly power of humanity 
— he does absolve ; let theology say what it will of absolu- 
tion, he gives peace to the conscience — he is a type and as- 
surance of what God is — he breaks the chains and lets the 
saptive go free. 



The Illusiveness of Life, 487 



VL 

THE ILLUSIYENESS OF LIFE. 

*'By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which ht 
should aftei- receive for an inheritance, obeyed ; and he went out, not know- 
ing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a 
strange countiy, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with 
him of the same promise: for he looked for a city which hath foundations, 
whose builder and maker is God." — Heb. xi. 8-10. 

Last Sunday we touched upon a thought which deserves 
further development. God promised Canaan to Abraham, 
and yet Abraham never inherited Canaan : to the last he was 
a wanderer there ; he had no possession of his own in its ter- 
ritory ; if he wanted even a tomb to bury his dead, he could 
only obtain it by purchase. This difficulty is expressly ad- 
mitted in the text, " In the land of promise he sojourned as 
in a strange country ;" he dwelt there in tents — in changeful, 
movable tabernacles — not permanent habitations ; he had no 
home there. 

It is stated in all its startling force, in terms still more ex- 
plicit, in the Vth chapter of the Acts, 5th verse, "And He 
gave him none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his 
foot on : yet He promised that He would give it to him for a 
possession, and to his seed after him, when as yet he had no 
child." 

Now the surprising point is that Abraham, deceived, as 
you might almost say, did not complain of it as a deception ; 
he was even grateful for the non-fulfillment of the promise : 
he does not seem to have expected its fulfillment ; he did not 
look for Canaan, but for " a city which had foundations ;" his 
faith appears to have consisted in disbelieving the letter, al- 
most as much as in believing the spirit of the promise. 

And herein lies a principle, which, rightly expounded, can 
help us to interpret this life of ours. God's promises never 
are fulfilled in the sense in which they seem to have been 
given. Life is a deception ; its anticipations, which are God's 
promises to the imagination, are never realized; they who 
know life best, and have trusted God most to fill it with 
blessings, are ever the first to say that life is a series of dis- 
appointments. And in the spirit of this text we have to say 
that it is a wise and merciful arrangement which ordams it 
thus. 



488 The Illusiveness of Life, 

The wise and holy do not expect to find it otherwise- 
would not wish it otherwise ; their wisdom consists in disbe- 
lieving its promises. To develop this idea would be a glori- 
ous task ; for to justify God's ways to man, to expound the 
mysteriousness of our present being, to interpret God — is not 
this the very essence of the ministerial ofSce ? All that I 
can hope, however, to-day, is not to exhaust the subject but 
to furnish hints for thought. Over-statements may be made, 
illustrations may be inadequate, the new ground of an almost 
untrodden subject may be torn up too rudely ; but remem- 
ber, we are here to live and die ; in a few years it will be all 
over ; meanwhile, what we have to do is to try to under- 
stand, and to help one another to understand, what it all 
means — what this strange and contradictory thing, which 
we call life, contains within it. Do not stop to ask, there- 
fore, whether the subject was satisfactorily worked out ; let 
each man be satisfied to have received a germ of thought 
which he may develop better for himself. 

I. The deception of life's promise. 
II. The meaning of that deception. 

Let it be clearly understood, in the first place, the promise 
never was fulfilled. I do not say the fulfillment was delay- 
ed. I say it never was fulfilled. Abraham had a few feet 
of earth, obtained by purchase — beyond that nothing ; he 
died a stranger and a pilgrim in the land. Isaac had a little. 
So small was Jacob's hold upon his country that the last 
years of his life were spent in Egypt, and he died a foreigner 
in a strange land. His descendants came into the land of 
Canaan, expecting to find it a land flowing, with milk and 
honey ; they found hard work to do — war and unrest, in- 
stead of rest and peace. 

During one brief period, in the history of Israel, the prom- 
ise may seem to have been fulfilled. It was during the later 
years of David and the earlier years of Solomon ; but we 
have the warrant of Scripture itself for affirming, that even 
then the promise Avas not fulfilled. In the Book of Psalms, 
David speaks of a hope of entering into d^futiire rest. The 
writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, quoting this passage, 
infers from it that God's promise had not been exhausted 
nor fulfilled by the entrance into Canaan ; for he says, " If 
Joshua had given them rest, then would he not have spoken 
of another day." Again, in this very chapter, after a long 
list of Hebrew saints — "These all died in faith, not having 
received the promises." To none therefore had the promise 
been fulfilled. Accordingly writers on prophecy, in order tc 



The IllMsiveness of Life, 489 

get over this difficulty, take for granted that there must be 
a future fulfillment, because the first was inadequate. 

They who believe that the Jews wdll be restored to their 
native land, expect it on the express ground that Canaan 
has never been actually and permanently theirs. A certain 
tract of country — three hundred miles in length, by two 
hundred in breadth — must be given, or else they think the 
promise has been broken. To quote the expression of one 
of the most eloquent' of their writers, " If there be nothmg 
yet future for Israel, then the magnificence of the promise 
has been lost in the poverty of its accomplishment." 

I do not quote this to prove the correctness of the inter- 
pretation of the prophecy, but as an acknowledgment which 
may be taken so far as a proof that the promise made to 
Abraham has never been accomplished. 

And such is life's disappointment. Its promise is, you 
shall have a Canaan; it turns out to be a baseless airy 
dream — toil and warfare — nothing that we can call our own ; 
not the land of rest by any means. But we will examine 
this in particulars. 

1. Our senses deceive us; we begin life with delusion. 
Our senses deceive us with respect to distance, shape, and 
color. That which afar off seems oval turns out to be circu- 
lar, modified by the perspective of distance ; that which ap- 
pears a speck, upon nearer approach becomes a vast body. 
To the earlier ages the stars presented the delusion of small 
lamps hung in space. The beautiful berry proves to be bit- 
ter and poisonous : that which apparently moves is really at 
rest: that which seems to be stationary is in perpetual mo- 
tion : the earth moves : the sun is still. All experience is a 
correction of life's delusions — a modification, a reversal of the 
judgment of the senses : and all life is a lesson on the false- 
hood of appearances. 

2. Our natural anticipations deceive us — I say natural in 
contradistinction to extravagant expectations. Every hu- 
man life is a fresh one, bright with hopes that will never be 
realized. There may be differences of character in these 
hopes ; finer spirits may look on life as the arena of success- 
ful deeds, the more selfish as a place of personal enjoyment. 

With man the turning-point of life may be a profession — 
with woman, marriage ; the one gilding the future with the 
tnumphs of intellect, the other with the dreams of affecxion ; 
but in every case, life is not what any of them expects, but 
something else. It would almost seem a satire on existence 
to compare the youth in the outset of his career, flushed and 
sanguine, with the aspect of the same being when it is near* 



490 The Illusiveness of Life, 

ly done^-worn, sobered, covered with the dust of life, and 
confessing that its days have been few and evil. Where is 
the land flowing with milk and honey? 

With our affections it is still worse, because they promise 
more. Man's affections are but the tabernacles of Canaan — 
the tents of a night ; not permanent habitations even for this 
life. Where are the charms of character, the perfection, and , 
the purity, and the truthfulness, which seemed so resplendent 
in our friend ? They were only the shape of our own con- 
ceptions — our creative shaping intellect projected its own 
fantasies on him : and hence we outgrow our early friend- 
ships ; outgrow the intensity of all : we dwell in tents ; we 
never find a home, even in the land of promise. Life is an 
unenjoyable Canaan, with nothing real or substantial in it. 

3. Our expectations, resting on revelation, deceive us. 
The world's history has turned round two points of hope ; 
one, \h.Q first — the other, the second coming of the Messiah. 
The magnificent imagery of Hebrew prophecy had described 
the advent of the Conqueror ; He came — " a root out of a 
dry ground, with no form or comeliness: and when they saw 
Him there was no beauty in Him that they should desire 
Him." The victory, predicted in such glowing terms, turned 
out to be the victory of submission — the law of our hu- 
manity, which wins by gentleness and love. The promise 
in the letter was unfulfilled. For ages the world's hope has 
been the second advent. The early church expected it in 
their own day. " We, which are alive, and remain until the 
coming of our Lord." 

The Saviour Himself had said, " This generation shall 
not pass till all things be fulfilled." Yet the Son of Man has 
never come ; or rather. He has been ever coming. Unnum- 
bered times the judgment-eagles have gathered together 
over corruption ripe for condemnation. Times innumerable 
the separation has been made between good and bad. The 
promise has not been fulfilled, or it has been fulfilled, but 
in either case anticipation has been foiled and disappointed. 

There are two ways of considering this aspect of life. 
One is the way of sentiment ; the other is the way of faith. 
The sentimental way is trite enough. Saint, sage, sophist, 
moralist, and preacher, have repeated in every possible 
image, till there is nothing new to say, that life is a bubble, 
a dream, a delusion, a phantasm. The other is the way of 
faith : the ancient saints felt as keenly as any moralist could 
feel the brokenness of its promises ; they confessed that they 
were strangers and pilgrims here ; they said that they had 
here no continuing city ; but they did not mournfully moralize 



The Illusiveness of Life, 491 

on this ; they said it cheerfully, and rejoiced that it was so^ 
They felt that all was right ; they knew that the promise 
itself had a deeper meaning : they looked undauntedly fo? 
" a city which hath foundations." 

n. The second inquiry, therefore, is the meaning of this 
delusiveness. 

1. It serves to allure us on. Suppose that a spiritual 

Eromise had been made at first to Israel ; imagine that they 
ad been informed at the outset that God's rest is inward ; 
that the promised land is only found in the Jerusalem which 
is above — not material, but immaterial. That rude, gross 
people, yearning after the fleshpots of Egypt — willing to go 
back into slavery, so as only they might have enough to eat 
and drink — would they have quitted Egypt on such terms ? 
AYould they have begun one single step of that pilgrimage 
which was to find its meaning in the discipline of ages ? 

We are led through life as we are allured upon a journey. 
Could a man see his route before him — a flat, straight road, 
unbroken by bush, or tree, or eminence, with the sun's heat 
burning down upon it, stretched out in dreary monotony — 
he could scarcely find energy to begin his task ; but the un- 
certainty of what may be seen beyond the next turn keeps 
expectation alive. The view that may be seen from yonder 
summit — the glimpse that may be caught, perhaps, as the 
road winds round yonder knoll — hopes like these, not far 
distant, beguile the traveller on from mile to mile, and from 
leag^ue to leasjue. 

In fact, life is an education. The object for which you 
educate your son is to give him strength of purpose, self- 
command, discipline of mental energies ; but you do not re- 
veal to your son this aim of his education ; you tell him of 
his place in his class, of the prizes at the end of the year, of 
the honors to be given at college. 

These are not the true incentives to knowledge ; such in- 
centives are not the highest — they are even mean, and par- 
tially injurious ; yet these mean incentives stimulate and 
lead on, from day to day and from year to year, by a process 
the principle of which the boy himself is not aware of So 
does God lead on, through life's unsatisfying and false re- 
ward, ever educating : Canaan first ; then the hope of a Re- 
deemer ; then the millennial glory. 

Now what is remarkable in this is, that the delusion 
continued to the last ; they all died in faith, not having re- 
ceived the promises ; all were hoping up to the very last, 
and all died in faith, not in realization ; for thus God haa 



492 The Illusiveness of Life, 

constituted the human heart. It never will be believed that 
this world is unreal. God has mercifully so arranged it, that 
the idea of delusion is incredible. You may tell the boy or 
girl as you will that life is a disappointment ; yet however 
you may persuade them to adopt your tone^ and catch the 
language of your sentiment, they are both looking forward 
kto some bright distant hope — the rapture of the next vaca- 
tion, or the unknown joys of the next season — and throwing 
into it an energy of expectation which only a whole eternity 
is worth. You may tell the man who has received the heart- 
shock from which in this world he will not recover, that life 
has nothing left ; yet the stubborn heart still hopes on, ever 
near the prize — " wealthiest when most undone :" he has 
reaped the whirlwind, but he will go on still, till life is over, 
sowing the wind. 

Now observe the beautiful result which comes from this 
indestructible power of believing in spite of failure. In the 
first centuries, the early Christians believed that the millen- 
nial advent was close; they heard the warning of the apos- 
tle, brief and sharp, "The time is short." Now suppose 
that, instead of this, they had seen all the dreary page of 
Church history unrolled ; suppose that they had known that 
after two thousand years the world would have scarcely 
spelled out three letters of the meaning of Christianity, 
where would have been those gigantic efforts, that life spent 
as on the very brink of eternity, which characterize the days 
of the early Church, and which was, after all, only the true 
life of man in time ? It is thus that God has led on His 
world. He has conducted it as a father leads his child, when 
the path homeward lies over many a dreary league. He 
suffers him to beguile the thought of time, by turning aside 
to pluck now and then a flower, to chase now a butterfly ; 
the butterfly is crushed, the flower fades, but the child is 
so much nearer home, invigorated and full of health, and 
scarcely wearied yet. 

2. This non-fulfillment of promise fulfills it in a deeper 
way. The account we have given alread}^, were it to end 
there, would be insufficient to excuse the failure of life's 
promise ; by saying that it allures us would be really to 
charge God with deception. Now life is not deception, 
but illusion. "We distinguish between illusion and delusion. 
We may paint wood so as to be taken for stone, iron, or 
marble ; this is delusion : but you may paint a picture, in 
which rocks, trees, and sky are never mistaken for what 
they seem, yet produce all the emotion which real rocks, 
trees, and sky would produce. This is illusion, and this 



The Illusiveness of Life. 493 

Is the painter's art : never for one moment to deceive by at' 
tempted imitation, but to produce a mental state in which the 
feelings are suggested which the natural objects themselves 
would create. Let us take an instance drawn from life. 

To a child a rainbow is a real thing — substantial and pal- 
pable ; its limb rests on the side of yonder hill ; he believes 
that he can appropriate it to himself; and when, instead of 
gems and gold hid in its radiant bow, he finds nothing but 
damp mist, cold, dreary drops of disappointment — that dis- 
appointment tells that his belief has been delusion. 

To the educated man that bow is a blessed illusion, yet it 
never once deceives ; he does not take it for what it is not ; 
he does not expect to make it his own ; he feels its beauty 
as much as the child could feel it, nay infinitely more — more 
even from the fact that he knows that it will be transient ; 
but besides and beyond this, to him it presents a deeper 
loveliness ; he knows the laws of light, and the laws of the 
human soul which gave it being. He has linked it with the 
laws of the universe, and with the invisible mind of God ; 
and it brings to him a thrill of awe, and the sense of a mys- 
terious, nameless beauty, of which the child did not con- 
ceive. It is illusion still ; but it has fulfilled the promise. 
In the realm of spirit, in the temple of the soul, it is the 
.same. All is illusion ; " but we look for a city which hath 
foundations ;" and in this the promise is fulfilled. 

And such was Canaan to the Israelites. To some, doubt- 
less, it was delusion. They expected to find their reward in 
a land of milk and honey. They were bitterly disappointed, 
and expressed their disappointment loudly enough in their 
murmurs against Moses, and their rebellion against his suc- 
cessors. But to others, as to Abraham, Canaan was the 
bright illusion which never deceived, but forever shone be- 
fore as the type of something more real. And even taking 
the promise literally, though they built in tents, and could 
not call a foot of land their own, was not its beauty theirs ? 
Were not its trellised vines, and glorious pastures, and rich 
olive-fields, ministers to the enjoyment of those who had all 
in God, though its milk, and oil, and honey, could not be en- 
joyed with exclusiveness of appropriation ? Yet over and 
above and beyond this, there was a more blessed fulfillment 
of the promise ; there was " a city which had foundations " 
. — built and made by God — towards which the anticipation 
of this Canaan was leading them. The kingdom of God was 
forming in their souls, forever disappointing them by the un- 
reitil, and teaching them that what is spiritual and belongs 
to mind and character, alone can be eternaL 



494 ^'^^ Illusiveness of Life. 

We will illustrate this principle from the common walks 
of life. The principle is, that the reward we get is not the 
reward for which we worked, but a deeper one ; deeper and 
more permanent. The merchant labors all his life, and the 
hope which leads him on is perhaps wealth : well, at sixty 
years of age he attains wealth ; is that the reward of sixty 
years of toil ? Ten years of enjoyment, when the senses can 
enjoy no longer — a country-seat, splendid plate, a noble es- 
tablishment ? Oh, no ! a reward deeper than he dreamed 
of — habits of perseverance : a character trained by indus- 
try: that is his reward. He was carried on from year to 
year by, if he were wise, illusion ; if he were unwise, delu- 
sion ; but he reaped a more enduring substance in himself 

Take another instance : the public man, warrior, or states- 
man, who has served his country, and comj^lains at last, in 
bitter disappointment, that his country has not fulfilled his 
expectations in rewarding him — that is, it has not given him 
titles, honors, wealth. But titles, honors, wealth — are these 
the rewards of well-doing? can they reward it ? would it be 
well-doing if they could ? To he such a man, to have the 
power of doing such deeds, what could be added to that re- 
ward by having? This same apparent contradiction, which 
was found in Judaism, subsists too in Christianity ; we will 
state it in the words of an apostle : " Godliness is profitable 
for all things ; having the promise of the life that now is, as 
well as of that which is to come." Now for the fulfillment : 
" If in this life only we have hope in Christ, then are we of 
all men most miserable." 

Godliness is profitable ; but its profit, it appears, consists in 
finding that all is loss : yet in this way you teach your son. 
You will tell him that if he will be good all men will love 
him. You say that " Honesty is the best policy," yet in 
your heart of hearts you know that you are leading him on 
by a delusion. Christ was good. Was he loved by all? In 
proportion as he, your son, is like Christ, he will be loved, 
not by the many, but by the few. Honesty is. not the best 
policy; the commonplace honesty of the market-place may 
be — the vulgar honesty which goes no farther than paying 
debts accurately ; but that transparent Christian honesty of 
a life which in every act is bearing witness to the truth, that 
is not the way to get on in life — the reward of such a life is 
the cross. Yet you were right in teaching your son this : 
you told him what was true ; truer than he could compre- 
hend. It is better to be honest and good ; better than 
he can know or dream : better even in this life ; better by %o 
much as being good is better than having good. But, in a 



The Sacrifice of Christ. 495 

rade coarse way, you must express the blessedness on a level 
with his capacity; you must state the truth in a way 
which he will inevitably interpret falsely. The true inter- 
pretation nothing but experience can teach. 

And this is what God does. His promises are true, though 
illusive; far truer than we at first take them to be. We 
work for a mean, low, sensual happiness, all the while He is 
leading us on to a spiritual blessedness, unfathomably deep. 
This is the life of faith. We live by faith, and not by sight 
We do not preach that all is disappointment — the dreary 
creed of sentimentalism ; but we preach that nothing here is 
disappointment, if rightly understood. We do not comfort 
the poor man, by saying that the riches that he has not now 
he will have hereafter — the difference between himself and 
the man of wealth being only this, that the one has for time 
what the other will have for eternity ; but what we say is, 
that that which you have failed in reaping here you never 
will reap, if you expected the harvest of Canaan. God has 
DO Canaan for His own ; no milk and honey for the luxury 
of the senses : for the city which hath foundations is built in 
the soul of man. He in whom Godlike character dwells has 
all the universe for his own — "All things," saith. the apostle, 
" are yours ; whether life or death, or things present, or 
things to come ; if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's 
seed, and heirs according to the/)rom^5e." 



VII. 
THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST. 

" For the love of Christ constraineth us : because we thus judge, that if 
one died for all, then were all dead : and that he died for all, that they which 
live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for 
them, and rose again." — 2 Cor. v. 14, 15. 

It may be, that in reading these verses some of us have 
understood them in a sense foreign to that of the apostle. 
It may have seemed that the arguments ran thus — Because 
Christ died upon the cross for all^ therefore all must have 
been in a state of spiritual death before ; and if they were 
asked what doctrines are to be elicited from this passage 
they would reply, " the doctrine of universal depravity, and 
the constraining power of the gratitude due to Him who 
died to redeem us from it." There is, however, in the first 
place, this fatal objection to such an interpretation, that the 



49^ The Sacrifice of Christ, 

death here spoken of is used in two diametrically opposite 
senses. In reference to Christ, death literal — in reference to 
all, death spiritual. Now, in the thought of St. Paul, the 
death of Christ was always viewed as liberation from the 
power of evil : " in that He died. He died unto sin once," and 
again, " he that is dead is free from sin." The literal death, 
then, in one clause, means freedom from sin ; the spiritual 
death of the next is slavery to it. Wherein, then, lies the co- 
gency of the apostle's reasoning ? How does it follow that 
because Christ died to evil, all before that must have died to 
God ? Of course that doctrine is true in itself, but it is not 
the doctrine of the text. 

In the next place, the ambiguity belongs only to the Eng- 
lish word — it is impossible to make the mistake in the orig- 
inal : the word which stands for were^ is a word which does 
not imply a continued state, but must imply a single finish- 
ed act. It can not by any possibility imply that before the 
death of Christ men were in a state of death — it can only 
mean, they became dead at the moment when Christ died. 
If you readmit thus, the meaning of the English will emerge 
— " if one died for all, then all died ;" and the apostle's ar- 
gument runs thus, that if one acts as the representative of 
all, then his act is the act of all. If the ambassador of a na- 
tion makes reparation in a nation's name, or does homage for 
a nation, that reparation, or that homage, is the nation's act 
— if owe did it /or all, then all did it. So that instead of in- 
ferring that because Christ died for all, therefore before that 
all were dead to God, his natural inference is that therefore 
all are now dead to sin. 

Once more, the conclusion of the apostle is exactly the re- 
verse of that which this interpretation attributes to him : he 
does not say that Christ died in order that men might not 
die, but exactly for this very purpose, that they might die ; 
and this death he represents in the next verse by an equiva- 
lent expression — the life of unselfishness : " that they which 
live might henceforth live not unto themselves." The 
" dead " of the first verse are " they that live " of the sec- 
ond. 

The form of thought finds its exact parallel in Romans vi 
10, 11. Two points claim our attention : 

I. The vicarious sacrifice of Christ. 
IL The influence of that sacrifice on man. 

I. The vicariousness of the sacrifice is implied in the word 
"for." A vicarious act is an act done for another. When 
the Pope calls himself the vicar of Christ, he implies that he 



The Sacrifice of Christ 497 

acts for Christ. The vicar or viceroy of a kingdom is one 
who acts for the king — a vicar's act, therefore, is virtually 
the act of the principal whom he represents ; so that if the 
Papal doctrine were true, when the vicar of Christ pardons^ 
Christ has pardoned. When the viceroy of a kingdom has 
published a proclamation or signed a treaty, the sovereign 
himself is bound by those acts. 

The truth of the expression for all, is contained in this 
fact, that Christ is the representative of humanity — properly 
speaking, the representative of human nature. This is the 
truth contained in the emphatic expression, " Son of Man." 
What Christ did for humanity was done by humanity, be- 
cause in the name of humanity. For a truly vicarious act 
does not supersede the principal's duty of performance, but 
rather implies and acknowledges it. Take the case from 
which this very word of vicar has received its origin. In 
the old monastic times, when the revenues of a cathedral or 
a cure fell to the lot of a monastery, it became the duty of 
that monastery to perform the religious services of the cure. 
But inasmuch as the monastery was a corporate body, they 
appointed one of their number, whom they denominated their 
vicar, to discharge those offices for them. His service did 
not supersede theirs, but was a perpetual and standing ac- 
knowledgment that they, as a whole and individually, were 
under the obligation to perform it. The act of Christ is the 
act of humanity — that which all humanity is bound to do. 
His righteousness does not supersede our righteousness, nor 
does His sacrifice supersede our sacrifice. It is the repre- 
sentation of human life and human sacrifice — vicarious for 
all, yet binding upon all. 

That He died for all is true — 

1. Because He was the victim of the sin of all. In the pe- 
culiar phraseology of St. Paul, He died unto sin. He was 
the victim of sin — He died by sin. It is the appalling mys- 
tery of our redemption that the Redeemer took the attitude 
of subjection to evil. There was scarcely a form of evil with 
which Christ did not come in contact, and by which He did 
not sufl*er. He was the victim of false friendship and in- 
gratitude, the victim of bad government and injustice. He 
fell a sacrifice to the vices of all classes — to the selfishness of 
the rich and the fickleness of the poor : intolerance, formal 
ism, skepticism, hatred of goodness, were the foes which 
crushed Him. 

In the proper sense of the word He was a victim. He did 
not adroitly wind through the dangerous forais of evil, meet- 
ing it with expedient silence. Face to face, and front to 



49^ The Sacrifice of Christ, 

front, He met it, rebuked it, and defied it ; and just as truly 
as he is a voluntary victim whose body, opposing the prog- 
ress of the car of Juggernaut, is crushed beneath its mon- 
strous wheels, was He a victim to the w^orld's sin : because 
pure. He w^as crushed by impurity; because just and real 
and true, He waked up the rage of injustice, hypocrisy and 
falsehood. 

Now this sin was the sin of all. Here arises at once a dif 
ficulty : it seems to be most unnatural to assert that in any 
one sense He was the sacrifice of the sin of all. We did not 
betray Him — that was Judas's act — Peter denied Him — 
Thomas doubted — Pilate pronounced sentence — it must be a 
figment to say that these were our acts ; we did not watch 
Him like the Pharisees, nor circumvent Him like the Scribes 
and lawyers ; by what possible sophistry can we be involved 
in the complicity of that guilt ? The savage of New Zealand 
who never heard of Him, the learned Egyptian, and the vo- 
luptuous Assyrian who died before He came ; how was it the 
sin of all ? 

The reply that is often given to this query is wonderfully 
unreal. It is assumed that Christ was conscious, by His 
omniscience, of the sins of all mankind ; that the duplicity 
of the child, and the crime of the assassin, and every unholy 
thought that has ever passed through a human bosom, were 
present to His mind in that awful hour as if they were His 
own. This is utterly unscriptural. Where is the single text 
from which it can be, except by force, extracted ? Besides 
this, it is fanciful and sentimental ; and again it is dangerous, 
for it represents the whole Atonement as a fictitious and 
shadowy transaction. There is a mental state in which men 
have felt the burden of sins which they did not commit. 
There have been cases, in which men have been mysteriously 
excruciated with the thought of having committed the un- 
pardonable sin. But to represent the mental phenomena of 
the Redeemer's mind as in any way resembling this — to say 
that His conscience was oppressed with the responsibility of 
sins which He had not committed — is to confound a state of 
sanity with the delusions of a half lucid mind, and the work- 
ings of a healthy conscience with those of one unnatural and 
morbid. 

There is a way, however, much more appalling and much 
more true, in which this may be true, without resorting to 
any such fanciful hypothesis. Sin has a great power in this 
world : it gives laws like those of a sovereign, which bind us 
all, and to which we are all submissive. There are current 
maxims in Church and State, in society, in trade, in law, to 



The Sacrifice of Christ. 499 

which we yield obedience. For this obedience every one is 
responsible ; for instance, in trade, and in the profession of 
law, every one is the servant of practices the rectitude of 
which his heart can only half approve — every one complains 
of them, yet all are involved in them. Now, when such sins 
reach their climax, as in the case of national bankruptcy or 
an unjust acquittal, there may be some who are in a special 
sense the actors in the guilt ; but evidently, for the bank- 
ruptcy, each member of the community is responsible in that 
degree and so far as he himself acquiesced in the duplicities 
of public dealing ; every careless juror, every unrighteous 
judge, every false witness, has done his part in the reduction 
of society to that state in which the monster injustice has 
been perpetrated. In the riot of a tumultuous assembly by 
night, a house may be burnt, or a murder committed ; in the 
eye of the law, all who are aiding and abetting there are 
each in his degree responsible for that crime ; there may be 
diiference in guilt, from the degree in which he is guilty 
who with his own hand perpetrated the deed, to that of him 
who merely joined the rabble from mischievous curiosity — - 
degrees from that of willful murder to that of more or less 
excusable homicide. 

The Pharisees were declared by the Saviour to be guilty 
of the blood of Zacharias, the blood of righteous Abel, and 
of all the saints and prophets who fell before He came. But 
how were the Pharisees guilty ? They built the sepulchres 
of the prophets, they honored and admired them ; but they 
were guilty, in that they were the children of those that slew 
the prophets ; children in this sense, that they inherited 
their spirit., they opposed the good in the form in which it 
showed itself in their day., just as their fathers opposed the 
form displayed to theirs ; therefore He said that they belong- 
ed to the same confederacy of evil, and that the guilt of the 
blood of all who had been slain should rest on that genera 
tion. Similarly we are guilty of the death of Christ. If 
you have been a false friend, a skeptic, a cowardly disciple, 
a formalist, selfish, an opposer of goodness, an oppressor, 
whatever evil you have done, in that degree and so far you 
participate in the evil to which the Just One fell a victim— 
you are one of that mighty rabble which cry, " Crucify Him ! 
Crucify Him !" for your sin He died ; His blood lies at your 
threshold. 

Again, He died for all, in that His sacrifice represents 
the sacrifice of all. We have heard of the doctrine of " im- 
puted righteousness ;" it is a theological expression to which 
meanings foolish enough are sometimes attributed, but it 



500 The Sacrifice of Christ 

contains a very deep truth, which it shall he our endeavol 
to elicit. 

Christ is the realized idea of our humanity. He is God's 
idea of man completed. There is every difference between 
the ideal and the actual — between what a man aims to be 
and what he is ; a difference between the race as it is, and 
the race as it existed in God's creative idea when He pro- 
nounced it very good. 

In Christ, therefore, God beholds humanity ; in Christ 
He sees perfected every one in whom Christ's spirit exists 
in germ. He to whom the possible is actual, to whom what 
will be already ^5, sees all things joresen^, gazes on the Imper- 
fect, and sees it in its perfection. Let me venture an illus- 
tration. He who has never seen the vegetable world except 
in Arctic regions, has but a poor idea of the majesty of 
vegetable life — a microscopic red moss tinting the surface 
of the snow, a few stunted pines, and here and there per- 
haps a dwindled oak ; but to the botanist who has seen the 
luxuriance of vegetation in its tropical magnificence, all that 
wretched scene presents another aspect ; to him those dwarfs 
are the representatives of what might be, nay, what has been 
in a kindlier soil and a more genial climate ; he fills up by 
his conception the miserable actuality presented by these 
shrubs, and attributes to them — imputes, that is, to them 
— the majesty of which the undeveloped germ exists already. 

Now the difference between those trees seen in them- 
selves, and seen in the conception of their nature's perfect- 
ness which has been previously realized, is the difference 
between man seen in himself and seen in Christ. We are 
feeble, dwarfish, stunted specimens of humanity. Our best 
resolves are but withered branches, our holiest deeds unripe 
and blighted fruit ; but to the Infinite Eye, who sees in the 
perfect One the type and assurance of that which shall be, 
this dwindled humanity of ours is divine and glorious. 
Such are we in the sight of God the Father as is the very 
Son of God Himself. This is what theologians, at least the 
wisest of them, meant by "imputed righteousness." I do 
not mean that all who have written or spoken on the subject 
had this conception of it, but I believe they who thought 
truly meant this; they did not suppose that in imputing 
righteousness there was a kind of figment, a self-deception 
in the mind of God ; they did not mean that by an act of 
will He chose to consider that every act which Christ did 
was done by us ; that He imputed or reckoned to us the 
baptism in Jordan and the victory in the wilderness, and 
the agony in the garden, or that He believed, or acted as if 



The Sacrifice of ChrisL 501 

He believed, that when Christ died, each one of us died: 
but He saw Humanity submitted to the law of self-sacrifice ; 
in the light of that idea He beholds us as perfect, and is 
satisfied. In this sense the apostle speaks of those that are 
imperfect, yet "by one offering He hath perfected forever 
them that are sanctified." It is true, again, that He died for 
?2S, in that we present His sacrifice as ours. The value of 
the death of Christ consisted in the surrender of self-will 
In the fortieth Psalm, the value of every other kind of sacri- 
fice being first denied, the words follow, " Then said I, Lo, I 
come to do thy will, O God." The profound idea contained, 
therefore, in the death of Christ is the duty of self-surrender. 

But in %is that surrender scarcely deserves the name ; 
even to use the word self-sacrifice covers us with a kind of 
shame. Then it is that there is an almost boundless joy in 
acquiescing in the life and death of Christ, recognizing it as 
ours, and representing it to ourselves and God as what we 
aim at. If we can not understand how in this sense it can 
be a sacrifice for us, we may partly realize it by remembering 
the joy of feeling how art and nature realize for us what we 
can not realize for ourselves. It is recorded of one of the 
world's gifted painters that he stood before the masterpiece 
of the great genius of his age — one which he could never 
hope to equal, nor even rival — and yet the infinite superi- 
ority, so far from crushing him, only elevated his feeling, 
for he saw realized those conceptions which had floated 
before him, dim and unsubstantial ; in every line and touch 
he felt a spirit immeasurably superior yet kindred, and he is 
reported to have exclaimed, with dignified humility, "And I 
too am a painter !" 

We must all have felt, when certain effects in nature, 
combinations of form and color, have been presented to 
us, our own idea speaking in intelligible and yet celestial 
language ; when, for instance, the long bars of purple, " edged 
with intolerable radiance," seemed to float in a sea of pale 
pure green, when the whole sky seemed to reel with thunder, 
when the night-wind moaned. It is wonderful how the most 
commonplace men and women — beings who, as you would 
have thought, had no conception that rose beyond a com- 
mercial speculation or a fashionable entertainment — are ele- 
vated by such scenes ; how the slumbering grandeur of 
their nature wakes and acknowledges kindred with the sky 
and storm. " I can not speak," they would say, " the feelings 
which are in me ; I have had emotions, aspirations, thoughts ; 
I can not put them into words. Look there ! listen now to 
the storm I That is what I meant, only I never could say 



502 The Sacrifice of Christ 

it out till now." Thus do art and nature speak for us, and 
thus do we adopt them as our own. This is the way in which 
His righteousness becomes righteousness for us. This is the 
way in which the heart presents to God the sacrifice of Christ', 
gazing on that perfect Life we, as it were, say, " There, that 
is my religion — that is my righteousness — what I want to be, 
which I am not — that is my ofiering, my life as I would wish 
to give it, freely and not checked, entire and perfect." So 
the old prophets, their hearts big with unutterable thoughts, 
searched " what or what manner of time the spirit of Christ 
which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand 
of the sufferings of Christ, and of the glory which should 
follow;" and so with us, until it passes into prayer: "My 
Saviour, fill up the blurred and blotted sketch which my 
clumsy hand has drawn of a divine life, with the fullness of 
Thy perfect picture. I feel the beauty which I can not 
realize : — robe me in Thine unutterable purity \— 

*' Rock of ages, cleft for me, 
Let me hide myself in Thee." 

II. The influence of that sacrifice on man is the introduc- 
tion of the principle of self-sacrifice into his nature — " then 
were all dead." Observe, again, not He died that we might 
not die, but that in His death we might be dead, and that 
in His sacrifice we might become each a sacrifice to God. 
Moreover, this death is identical with life. They who in the 
first sentence are called dead, are in the second denominated 
" they who live." So in another place, " I am crucified with 
Christ, nevertheless I live ;" death, therefore, that is, the sac- 
rifice of self, is equivalent to life. Now this rests upon a 
profound truth. The death of Christ was a representation 
of the life of God. To me this is the profoundest of all truths, 
that the whole of the life of God is the sacrifice of self God 
is love ; love is sacrifice — to give rather than to receive — the 
blessedness of self-giving. If the life of God were not such, it 
would be a falsehood to say that God is love ; for even in our 
human nature, that which seeks to enjoy all instead of giving 
all is known by a very different 'name from that of love. 
/All the life of God is a flow of this divine self-giving charity. 
Creation itself is sacrifice — the self-impartation of the Divine 
Being. Redemption, too, is sacrifice, else it could not be love ; 
for which reason we will not surrender one iota of the truth 
that the death of Christ was the sacrifice of God — the man- 
ifestation once in time of that which is the eternal law of His 
life. 

If man, therefore, is to rise into the life of God, he must be 



The Sacrifice of Christ. 503 

absorbed into the spirit of that sacrifice — he must die with 
CJirist if he would enter into his proper life. For sin is the 
withdrawing into self and egotism, out of the vivifying life 
of God, which alone is our true life. The moment the man 
sins he dies. Know we not how awfully true that sentence is, 
" Sin revived, and I died ?" The vivid life of sin is the death 
of the man. Have we never felt that our true existence has 
absolutely in that moment disappeared, and that we are not ? 

I say, tnerefore, that real human life is a perpetual comple- 
tion and repetition of the sacrifice of Christ — " all are dead;" 
the explanation of which follows, " to live not to themselves, 
but to Him who died for them and rose again." This is the 
truth which lies at the bottom of the Romish doctrine of the 
mass. Rome asserts that in the mass a true and proper sac- 
rifice is offered up for the sins of all — that the offering oi 
Christ is forever repeated. To this Protestantism has ob 
jected vehemently, that there is but one offering once of 
fered — an objection in itself entirely true ; yet the Romisb 
doctrine contains a truth which it is of importance to disen- 
gage from the gross and material form with which it has beei, 
overlaid. Let us hear St, Paul : " I fill up that which is be- 
hindhand of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh for his body's 
sake, which is the Church." Was there then something be- 
hindhand of Christ's sufferings remaining uncompleted, of 
which the sufferings of Paul could be in any sense the com- 
plement ? He says there was. Could the sufferings of Paul 
for the Church in any form of correct expression be said to 
eke out the sufferings that were complete ? In one sense it 
is true to say that there is one offering once offered for all. 
But it is equally true to say that that one offering is value- 
less, except so far as it is completed and repeated in the life 
and self-offering o/all. This is the Christian's sacrifice. Not 
mechanically completed in the miserable materialism of the 
mass, but spiritually in the life of all in whom the Crucified 
lives. The sacrifice of Christ is done over again in every life 
which is lived, not to self but to God, 

Let one concluding observation be made — self-denial, self- 
sacrifice, self-surrender ! Hard doctrines, and impossible ! 
Whereupon, in silent hours, we skeptically ask, Is this possi- 
ble ? is it natural ? Let preacher and moralist say what they 
will, I am not here to sacrifice myself for others. God sent 
He here for happiness, not misery, Now introduce one sen- 
tence of this text of which we have as yet said nothing, and 
the dark doctrine becomes illuminated — " the love of Christ 
constraineth us." Self-denial, for the sake of self-denial, doea 
no good ; self-sacrifice for its own sake is no religious act at 



564 The Pozv^r of Sorrow, 

all. If you give up a meal for the sake of showing powel 
over self, or for the sake of self-discipline, it is the most mis* 
erable of all delusions. You are not more religious in doing 
this than before. This is mere self-culture, and self-culture 
being occupied forever about self, leaves you only in that 
circle of self from which religion is to free you ; but to give 
up a meal that one you love may have it is properly a relig- 
ious act — no hard and dismal duty, because made easy by 
affection. To bear pain for the sake of bearing it has in it no 
moral quality at all, but to bear it rather than surrender 
truth, or in order to save another, is positive enjoyment as 
well as ennobling to the soul. Did you ever receive even a 
blow meant for another, in order to shield that other? Do 
you not know that there was actual pleasure in the keen pain 
far beyond the most rapturous thrill of nerve which could be 
gained from pleasure in the midst of painlessness ? Is not the 
mystic yearning of love expressed in words most purely thus, 
Let me suffer for him ? 

This element of love is that which makes this doctrine an 
intelligible and blessed truth. So sacrifice alone, bare and 
unrelieved, is ghastly, unnatural, and dead ; but self-sacrifice, 
illuminated by love, is warmth and life ; it is the death of 
Christ, the life of God, the blessedness and only proper life 
of man. 



VIII. 
THE POWER OF SORROW. 

*' Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry, hut that ye sorrowed to 
repentance: for ye were made sony after a godly manner, that ye might 
receive damage by us in nothing. For godly sorrow worketh repentance to 
salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death." 
—2 Cor. vii. 9, 10. 

That which is chiefly insisted on in this verse is the dis- 
tinction between sorrow and repentance. To grieve over sin 
is one thing, to repent of it is another. 

The apostle rejoiced, not that the Corinthians sorrowed, 
but that they sorrowed unto repentance. Sorrow has two 
results ; it may end in spiritual life, or in spiritual death ; and 
in themselves, one of these is as natural as the other. Sorrow 
may produce two kinds of reformation — a transient, or a per- 
manent one — an alteration in habits, which, originating in erao* 
tion, will last so long as that emotion continues, and then after 
a few fruitless efforts be given up — a repentance which will b^ 



The Power of Sorrow, 505 

repented of; or again, a permanent change, which will be re- 
versed by no afterthought — a repentance not to be repented 
of Sorrow is in itself, therefore, a thing neither good nor 
bad : its value depends on the spirit of the person on whom 
it falls. Fire will inflame straw, soften iron, or harden clay ; 
its effects are determined by the object with which it comes 
in contact. Warmth develops the energies of life, or helps 
the progress of decay. It is a great power in the hothouse, 
a great power also in the coflin : it expands the leaf, matures 
the fruit, adds precocious vigor to vegetable life : and warmth 
too develops with tenfold rapidity the weltering process of 
dissolution. So too with sorrow. There are spirits in which 
it develops the seminal principle of life ; there are others in 
which it prematurely hastens the consummation of irreparable 
iecay. Our subject therefore is the twofold power of sorrow. 

I. The fatal power of the sorrow of the world. 
II. The life-giving power of the sorrow that is after God. 

The simplest way in which the sorrow of the world works 
death, is seen in the effect of mere regret for worldly loss. 
There are certain advantages with which we come into the 
world. Youth, health, friends, and sometimes property. So 
long as these are continued we are happy ; and because hap- 
py, fancy ourselves very grateful to God. We bask in the 
sunshine of His gifts, and this pleasant sensation of sunning 
ourselves in life we call religion ; that state in which we all 
are before sorrow comes, to test the temper of the metal of 
which our souls are made, when the spirits are unbroken and 
the heart buoyant, when a fresh morning is to a young heart 
what it is to the skylark. The exuberant burst of joy seems 
a spontaneous hymn to the Father of all blessing, like the 
matin carol of the bird ; but this is not religion : it is the in- 
stinctive utterance of happy feeling, having as little of moral 
character in it, in the happy human being, as in the happy 
bird. 

Nay more : the religion which is only sunned into being 
by happiness is a suspicious thing — having been warmed by 
joy, it will become cold when joy is over; and then when 
these blessings are removed we count ourselves hardly treat- 
ed, as if we had been defrauded of a right ; rebellious hard 
feelings come ; then it is you see people become bitter, spite- 
ful, discontented. At every step in the solemn path of life 
something must be mourned which will come back no more ; 
the temper that was so smooth becomes rugged and uneven ; 
the benevolence that expanded upon all narrows into an ever- 
dwindling selfishness — we are aJore ; and then that d^ath' 



5o6 The Power of Sorrow, 

like loneliness deepens as life goes on. The course of man la 
downward, and he moves with slow and ever more solitary 
steps, down to the dark silence — the silence of the grave. 
This is the death of heart; the sorrow of the world has 
worked death. 

Again, there is a sorrow of the world, when sin is grieved 
for in a worldly spirit. There are two views of sin : in one 
it is looked upon as wrong — in the other, as producing loss- 
loss, for example, of character. In such cases, if character 
could be preserved before the world grief would not come ; 
but the paroxysms of misery fall upon our proud spirit when 
our guilt is made public. The most distinct instance we 
have of this is in the life of Saul. In the midst of his apparent 
grief, the thing still uppermost was that he had forfeited his 
kingly character : almost the only longing was, that Samuel 
should honor him before his people. And hence it comes to 
pass, that often remorse and anguish only begin with expo- 
sure. Suicide takes place, not when the act of wrong is done 
but when the guilt is known, and hence, too, many a one be- 
comes hardened who would otherwise have remained tolera- 
bly happy ; in consequence of which we blame the exposure, 
not the guilt ; we say if it had been hushed up all would 
have been well ; that the servant who robbed his master was 
ruined by taking away his character ; and that if the sin had 
been passed over repentance might have taken place, and he 
might have remained a respectable member of society. Do 
not think so. It is quite true that remorse was produced by 
exposure, and that the remorse was fatal ; the sorrow which 
worked death arose from that exposure, and so far exposure 
may be called the cause : had it never taken place, respecta- 
bility, and comparative peace, might have continued ; but 
outward respectability is not change of heart. 

It is well known that the corpse has been preserved for 
centuries in the iceberg, or in antiseptic peat; and that 
when atmospheric air was introduced to the exposed surface 
it crumbled into dust. Exposure worked dissolution, but it 
only manifested the death which was already there ; so with 
sorrow, it is not the living heart which drops to pieces or 
crumbles into dust, when it is revealed. Exposure did not 
work death in the Corinthian sinner, but life. 

There is another form of grief for sin, which the apostle 
would not have rejoiced to see ; it is when the hot tears 
come from pride. No two tones of feeling, apparently simi- 
lar, are more unlike than that in which Saul exclaimed, " I 
have played the fool exceedingly," and that in which the 
publican cried out, " God be merciful to me a sinner." The 



The Power of Sorrow. 507 

charge of folly brought against one's self only proves that we 
feel bitterly for having lost our own self-respect. It is a hu- 
miliation to have forfeited the idea which a man had formed 
of his own character — to find that the very excellence on 
which he prided himself is the one in which he has failed. 
If there were a virtue for which Saul was conspicuous it was 
generosity ; yet it was exactly in this point of generosity in 
which he discovered himself to have failed, when he was 
overtaken on the mountain, and his life spared by the very 
man whom he was hunting to the death with feelings of the 
meanest jealousy. Yet there was no real repentance there; 
there was none of that in which a man is sick of state and 
pomp. Saul could still rejoice in regal splendor, go about 
complaining of himself to the Ziphites, as if he was the most 
ill-treated and friendless of mankind; he was still jealous of 
his reputation, and anxious to be well thought of Quite dif- 
ferent is the tone in which the publican, who felt himself a sin- 
ner, asked for mercy. He heard the contumelious expression 
of the Pharisee, " this publican." With no resentment, he 
meekly bore it as a matter naturally to be taken for granted 
— "he did not so much as lift up his eyes to heaven;" he 
was as a worm which turns in agony, but not revenge, upon 
the foot which treads it into the dust. 

Now this sorrow of Saul's, too, works death : no merit can 
restore self-respect ; when once a man has found himself out 
he can not be deceived again. The heart is as a stone: a 
speck of canker corrodes and spreads within. What on this 
earth remains, but endless sorrow, for him who has ceased 
to respect himself, and has no God to turn to ? 

n. The divine power of sorrow. 

1. It works repentance. By repentance is meant, in Scrip- 
ture, change of life, alteration of habits, renewal of heart. 
This is the aim and meaning of all sorrow. The conse- 
quences of sin are meant to wean from sin. The penalty an- 
nexed to it is in the first instance, corrective, not penal. Fire 
burns the child, to teach it one of the truths of this universe 
— the property of fire to burn. The first time it cuts its 
Jiand with a sharp knife it has gained a lesson which it nev- 
er will forget. Now, in the case of pain this experience is sel- 
dom, if ever, in vain. There is little chance of a child forget- 
ting that fire will burn, and that sharp steel \\411 cut; but 
the moral lessons contained in the penalties annexed to 
wrong-doing are just as truly intended, though they are by 
no means so unerrmg in enforcing their application. The 
fever in the veins and the headache which succeed intoxica- 



5o8 The Power of Sorrow. 

tion, are meant to warn against excess. On the first occasion 
they are simply corrective ; in every succeeding one they as- 
sume more and more a penal character in proportion as the 
conscience carries with them the sense of ill desert. 

Sorrow, then, has done its work when it deters from evil ; 
in other words, when it works repentance. In the sorrow of 
the world, the obliquity of the heart towards evil is not 
cured ; it seems as if nothing cured it : heartache and trials 
come in vain ; the history of life at last is what it was at 
first. The man is found erring where he erred before. The 
game course, begun with the certainty of the same desperate 
end which has taken place so often before. 

They have reaped the whirlwind, but they will again sow 
the wind. Hence I believe that life-giving sorrow is less 
remorse for that which is irreparable, than anxiety to save 
that which remains. The sorrow that ends in death hangs 
in funeral weeds over the sepulchres of the past. Yet the 
present does not become more wise. Not one resolution is 
made more firm, nor one habit more holy. Grief is all. 
Whereas sorrow avails only when the past is converted into 
experience, and from failure lessons are learned which never 
are to be forgotten. 

2. Permanence of alteration ; for after all, a steady refor- 
mation is a more decisive test of the value of mourning than 
depth of grief. 

The susceptibility of emotion varies with individuals. 
Some men feel intensely, others sufier less keenly ; but this 
is constitutional, belonging to nervous temperament rather 
than to moral character. This is the characteristic of the 
divine sorrow, that it is a repentance "not repented of;" no 
transient, short-lived resolutions, but sustained resolve. 

And the beautiful law is, that in proportion as the repent- 
ance increases the grief diminishes. "I rejoice," says Paul, 
that "I made you sorry, though it were but for a time." 
Grief for a time, repentance forever. And few things more 
signally prove the wisdom of this apostle than his way of 
dealing with this grief of the Corinthian. He tried no arti- 
ficial means of intensifying it — did not urge the duty of 
dwelling upon it, magnifying it, nor even of gauging and 
examining it. So soon as grief had done its work the apos- 
tle was anxious to dry useless tears — he even feared lest 
haply such an one should be swallowed up with overmuch 
sorrow. " A true penitent," says Mr. Newman, " never for- 
gives himself" Oh false estimate of the Gospel of Christ and 
of the heart of man ! A proud remorse does not forgive it- 
self the forfeiture of its own dignity ; but it is the very beauty 



The Power of Sorrow, 509 

of the penitence which is according to God, that at last the 
sinner, realizing God's forgiveness, does learn to forgive him- 
self For what other purpose did St. Paul command the 
Church of Corinth to give ecclesiastical absolution, but in 
order to afford a symbol and assurance of the Divine par- 
don, in which the guilty man's grief should not be over- 
whelming, but that he should become reconciled to himself? 
What is meant by the publican's going dow7i to his house 
justified, but that he felt at peace with himself and God ? 

3. It is sorrow with God, here called godly sorrow ; in the 
margin sorrowing accordmg to God. 

God sees sin not in its consequences but in itself; a thing 
infinitely evil, even if the consequences were happiness to 
the guilty instead of misery. So sorrow according to God 
is to see sin as God sees it. The grief of Peter was as bit- 
ter as that of Judas. He went out and wept bitterly ; how 
bitterly none can tell but they who have learned to look on 
sin as God does. But in Peter's grief there was an element 
of hope ; and that sprung precisely from this — that he saw 
God in it all. Despair of self did not lead to despair of 
God. 

This is the great, peculiar feature of this sorrow : God is 
there, accordingly self is less prominent. It is not a micro- 
scopic self-examination, nor a mourning in which self is ever 
uppermost : my character gone ; the greatness of iny sin ; 
the forfeiture of my salvation. The thought of God absorbs 
all that. I believe the feeling of true penitence would ex- 
press itself in such words as these : — There is a righteous- 
ness, though I have not attained it. There is a purity, and 
a love, and a beauty, though my life exhibits little of it. In 
that I can rejoice. Of that I can feel the surpassing loveli- 
ness. My doings? They are worthless, I can not endure to 
think of them. I am not thinking of them. I have some- 
thing else to think of There, there ; in that life I see it. 
And so the Christian — gazing not on what he is, but on 
what he desires to be — dares in penitence to say. That right- 
eousness is mine : dares, even when the recollection of his 
sin is most vivid and most poignant, to say with Peter, 
thinking less of himself than of God, and sorrowing as it 
were with God — " Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thcu 
knowest that I love Thee." 



5 lO Sensual and Spiritual Excitements 



IX. 
SENSUAL AND SPIRITUAL EXCITEMENT. 

** Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the 
Lord is. And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess ; but be filled with 
the Spirit."— Eph. v. 17, 18. 

There is evidently a connection between the different 
branches of this sentence — for ideas can not be properly 
contrasted which have not some connection — but what that 
connection is, is not at first sight clear. It almost appears 
like a profane and irreverent juxtaposition to contrast full- 
ness of the Spirit with fullness of wine. Moreover, the 
structure of the whole context is antithetical. Ideas are op- 
posed to each other in pairs of contraries ; for instance, 
" fools " is the exact opposite to " wise ;" " unwise," as op- 
posed to " understanding," its proper opposite. 

And here again, there must be the same true antithesis 
between drunkenness and spiritual fullness. The propriety 
of this opposition lies in the intensity of feeling produced in 
both cases. There is one intensity of feeling produced by 
stimulating the senses, another by vivifying the spiritual life 
within. The one commences with impulses from without, 
the other is guarded by forces from within. Here then is 
the similarity, and here the dissimilarity, which constitutes 
the propriety of the contrast. One is ruin, the other salva- 
tion. One degrades, the other exalts. This contrast then is 
our subject for to-day. 

I. The effects are similar. On the day of Pentecost, when 
the first influences of the Spirit descended on the early 
Church, the effects resembled intoxication. They were full 
of the Spirit, and mocking by-standers said, " These men are 
full of new wine ;" for they found themselves elevated into 
the ecstasy of a life higher than their own, possessed of 
powers which they could not control ; they spoke incohe- 
rently and irregularly ; to the most part of those assembled, 
unintelligibly. 

Now compare with this the impression produced upon sav- 
age nations — suppose those early ages in which the spectacle 
of intoxication was presented for the first time. They saw 
a man under the influence of a force difierent from and ip 



Sensual and Spiritual Excitement. 511 

some respects inferior to, their own. To them the bacchanal 
appeared a being half inspired ; his frenzy seemed a thing for 
reverence and awe, rather than for horror and disgust ; the 
spirit which possessed him must be, they thought, divine ; they 
deified it, worshipped it under different names as a god ; even 
to a clearer insight the effects are wonderfully similar. It is 
almost proverbial among soldiers that the daring produced 
by wine is easily mistaken for the self-devotion of a brave 
heart. 

The play of imagination in the brain of the opium-eater is 
as free as that of genius itself, and the creations produced in 
that state by the pen or pencil are as wildly beautiful as 
those owed to the nobler influences. In years gone by, the 
oratory of the statesman in the senate has been kindled by 
semi-intoxication, when his noble utterances were set down 
by his auditors to the inspiration of patriotism. 

It is this very resemblance which deceives the drunkard: 
he is led on by his feelings as well as by his imagination. It 
is not the sensual pleasure of the glutton that fascinates 
him; it is those fine thoughts and those quickened sensi- 
bilities which were excited in that state, which he is power- 
less to produce out of his own being, or by his own powers, 
and which he expects to reproduce by the same means. The 
experience of our first parent is repeated in him : at the very 
moment when he expects to find himself as the gods, know- 
ing good and evil, he discovers that he is unexpectedly de 
graded, his health wrecked, and his heart demoralized. 
Hence it is almost as often the finer as the baser spirits of 
our race which are found the victims of such indulgence. 
Many will remember, while I speak, the names of the gifted 
of their species, the degraded men of genius who were the 
victims of these deceptive influences ; the half- inspired 
painter, poet, musician, who began by soothing opiates to 
calm the over-excited nerves or stimulate the exhausted 
brain, who mistook the sensation for somewhat half divine, 
and became, morally and physically, wrecks of manhood, de- 
graded even in their mental conceptions. It was therefore 
DO mere play of words which induced the apostle to bring 
these two things together. That which might else seem ir- 
reverent appears to have been a deep knowledge of human 
tiature ; he contrasts, because his rule was to distinguish two 
things which are easily mistaken for each other. 

The second point of resemblance is the necessity of in- 
tense feeling. We have fullness — fullness, it may be, pro- 
duced by outward stimulus, or else by an inpouring of the 
Spirit. What we want is life, "more life, and fuller." To 



512 Sensual and Spiritual Excitement, 

escape from monotony, to get away from the life of mere 
routine and habits, to feel that we are alive — with more of 
surprise and wakefulness in our existence. To have less of 
the gelid, torpid, tortoise-like existence. " To feel the years 
before us." To be consciously existing. 

Now this desire lies at the bottom of many forms of life 
which are apparently as diverse as possible. It constitutes 
the fascination of the gambler's life : money is not what he 
wants — were he possessed of thousands to-day he would risk 
them all to-morrow — but it is that being perpetually on the 
brink of enormous wealth and utter ruin, he is compelled to 
realize at every moment the possibility of the extremes of 
life. Every moment is one of feeling. This too, constitutes 
the charm of all those forms of life in which the gambling 
feeling is predominant — where a sense of skill is blended 
with a mixture of chance. If you ask the statesman why it 
is, that possessed as he is of wealth, he quits his princely 
home for the dark metropolis, he would reply, " that he 
loves the excitement of a political existence." It is this, too, 
which gives to the warrior's and the traveller's existence such 
peculiar reality; and it is this in a far lower form which 
stimulates the pleasure of a fashionable life — which sends 
the votaries of the world in a constant round from the capi- 
tal to the watering-place, and from the watering-place to the 
capital ; what they crave for is the power of feeling intensely. 

Now the proper and natural outlet for this feeling is the 
life of the Spirit. What is religion but fuller life ? To live 
in the Spirit, what is it but to have keener feelings and 
mightier powers — to rise into a higher consciousness of life ? 
What is religion's self but feeling ? The highest form of re- 
ligion is charity. Love is of God, and he that loveth is born 
of God, and knoweth God. This is an intense feeling, too in- 
tense to be excited, profound in its calmness, yet it rises at 
times in its higher flights into that ecstatic life which glances 
in a moment intuitively through ages. These are the pente- 
costal hours of our existence, when the Spirit comes as h 
mighty rushing wind, in cloven tongues of fire, filling the 
80ul with God. 

n. The dissimilarity or contrast in St. Paul's idea. The 
one fullness begins from without, the other from within. 
The one proceeds from the flesh and then influences the emo- 
tions. The other reverses this order. Stimulants like wine 
inflame the senses, and through them set the imaginations 
and feelings on fire ; and the law of our spiritual being is, 
that that which begins with the flesh sensnalizos the spirit— 



Sensual and Spiritual Excitement 513 

whereas that which commences in the region of the spirit 
spiritualizes the senses in which it subsequently stirs emo- 
tion. But the misfortune is that men mistake this law of 
their emotions; and the fatal error is, when having found 
spiritual feelings existing in connection, and associated with, 
fleshly sensations, men expect by the mere irritation of the 
emotions of the frame to reproduce those high and gloriouai 
feelings. 

You might conceive the recipients of the Spirit on the 
day of Pentecost acting under this delusion ; it is conceiv- 
able that having observed certain bodily phenomena — for 
instance, incoherent utterances and thrilled sensibilities co- 
existing with those sublime spiritualities — they might have 
endeavored, by a repetition of those incoherencies, to obtain 
a fresh descent of the Spirit. In fact, this was exactly what 
was tried in after ages of the Church. In those events of 
Church history which are denominated revivals in the camp 
of the Methodist and the Ranter, a direct attempt was made 
to arouse the emotions by exciting addresses and vehement 
language. Convulsions, shrieks, and violent emotions were 
produced, and the unfortunate victims of this mistaken at- 
tempt to produce the cause by the effect, fancied themselves, 
and were pronounced by others, converted. Now the mis- 
fortune is, that this delusion is the more easy from the tact 
that the results of the two kinds of causes resemble each 
other. You may galvanize the nerve of a corpse till the ac- 
tion of a limb startles the spectator with the appearance of 
life. It is not life, it is only a spasmodic hideous mimicry of 
life. Men having seen that the spiritual is always associated 
with forms, endeavor by reproducing the forms to recall 
spirituality; you do produce thereby a something that looks 
like spirituality, but it is a resemblance only. The worst case 
of all occurs in the department of the affections. That which 
begins in the heart ennobles the whole animal being, but 
that which begins in the inferior departments of our being ia 
the most entire degradation and sensualizing of the soul. 

Now it is from this point of thought that we learn to ex- 
tend the apostle's principle. Wine is but a specimen of a 
class of stimulants. All that begins from without belongs to 
the same class. The stimulus may be afforded by almost any 
enjoyment of the senses. Drunkenness may come from any 
thing wherein is excess : from over-indulgence in society, in 
pleasure, in music, and in the delight of listening to oratory, 
nay, even from the excitement of sermons and religious meet- 
ings. The prophet tells us of those who are drunken, and no! 
with wine. 



514 Sensual and Spiritual Excitement. 

The other point of difference is one of effect. Fullness of 
the Spirit calms; fullness produced by excitement satiates 
and exhausts. They who know the world of fashion tell ua 
that the tone adopted there is, either to be, or to affect to be, 
sated with enjoyment, to be proof against surprise, to have 
lost all keenness of enjoyment, and to have all keenness of 
wonder gone. That which ought to be men's shame becomes 
their boast — unsusceptibility of any fresh emotion. 

Whether this be real or affected matters not ; it is, in truth, 
the real result of the indulgence of the senses. The law is 
this ; the " crime of sense is avenged by sense which wears 
with time ;" for it has been well remarked that the terrific 
punishment attached to the habitual indulgence of the senses 
is, that the incitements to enjoyment increase in proportion 
as the power of enjoyment fades. 

Experience at last forbids even the hope of enjoyment ; the 
sin of the intoxicated soul is loathed, detested, abhorred ; yet 
it is done. The irritated sense, like an avenging fury, goads 
on with a restlessness of craving, and compels a reiteration 
of the guilt though it has ceased to charm. 

To this danger our own age is peculiarly exposed. In the 
earlier and simpler ages, the need of keen feeling finds a nat- 
ural and safe outlet in compulsory exertions. For instance, 
in the excitement of real warfare, and in the necessity of pro- 
viding the sustenance of life, warlike habits and healthy la- 
bor stimulate without exhausting life. But in proportion as 
civilization advances, a large class of the community are ex- 
empted from the necessity of these, and thrown upon a life 
of leisure. Then it is that artificial life begins, and artificial 
expedients become necessary to sharpen the feelings amongst 
the monotony of existence ; every amusement and all litera- 
ture become more pungent in their character; life is no long- 
er a thing proceeding from powers icithin^ but sustained by 
new impulses from without. 

There is one peculiar form of this danger to which I would 
specially direct your attention. There is one nation in Eu- 
rope which, more than any other, has been subjected to these 
influences. In ages of revolution, nations live fast ; centuriea 
of life are passed in fifty years of time. In such a state, in- 
di\iduals become subjected more or less to the influences 
which are working around them. Scarcely an enjoyment or 
a book can be met with which does not bear the impress of 
this intensity. Now, the particular danger to which I allude 
is French novels, French romances, and French plays. The 
overflowings of that cup of excitement have reached our 
shores. I do not say that these works contain any thing 



Sensual and Spiritual Excitement 5 1 5 

coarse or gross — ^better if it were so : evil which comes in a 
form of grossness is not nearly so dangerous as that which 
comes veiled in gracefulness and sentiment. Subjects which 
are better not touched upon at all are discussed, examined, 
and exhibited in all the most seductive forms of imagery. 
You would be shocked at seeing your son in a fit of intoxica- 
tion ; yet, I say it solemnly, better that your son should reel 
through the streets in a fit of drunkenness, than that the del- 
icacy of your daughter's mind should be injured, and her im- 
agination infiamed with false fire. Twenty-four hours will 
terminate the evil in the one case. Twenty-four hours will 
not exhaust the efiects of the other ; you must seek the con- 
sequences at the end of many, many years. 

I speak that which I do know ; and if the earnest warning 
of one who has seen the dangers of which he speaks realized, 
can reach the heart of one Christian parent, he will put a ban 
on all such works, and not suffer his children's hearts to be 
excited by a drunkenness which is worse than that of wine. 
For the worst of it is, that the men of our time are not yet 
alive to this growing evil ; they are elsewhere — in their stud- 
ies, counting-houses, professions — not knowing the food, or 
rather poison, on which their wives' and daughters' intellect- 
ual life is sustained. It is precisely those who are most un- 
fitted to sustain the danger, whose feelings need restraint in- 
stead of spur, and whose imaginations are most inflammable, 
that are specially exposed to it. 

On the other hand, spiritual life calms while it fills. True 
it is that there are pentecostal moments when such life reach- 
es the stage of ecstasy. But these were given to the Church 
to prepare her for suffering, to give her martyrs a glimpse of 
blessedness, which might sustain them afterwards in the ter- 
rible struggles of death. True it is that there are pentecos- 
tal hours when the soul is surrounded by a kind of glory, and 
we are tempted to make tabernacles upon the mount, as if 
life were meant for rest ; but out of that very cloud there 
comes a voice telling of the cross, and bidding us descend 
into the common world again, to simple duties and humble 
life. This very principle seems to be contained in the text. 
The apostle's remedy for this artificial feeling is — " Speaking 
to one another in psalms and hymns, and spiritual songs." 

Strange remedy ! Occupation fit for children — too simple 
far for men : as astonishing as the remedy prescribed by the 
prophet to Naaman — to wash in simple water, and be clean ; 
yet therein lies a very important truth. In ancient medical 
phraseology, herbs possessed of healing natures were called 
simples ; in God's laboratory, all things that heal are simple 



5 1 6 Purity. 

—all natural enjoyments, all the deepest, are simple too. At 
night, man fills his banquet-hall with the glare of splendo/ 
which fevers as well as fires the heart ; and at the very same 
hour, as if they intended contrast, the quiet stars of God steal 
forth, shedding, together with the deepest feeling, the pro- 
foundest sense of calm. One from whose knowledge of the 
sources of natural feeling there lies almost no appeal, has said 
that to him, 

"The meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 

This is exceedingly remarkable in the life of Christ. No 
contrast is more striking than that presented by the thought, 
that that deep and beautiful life was spent in the midst 
of mad Jerusalem. Remember the Son of Man standing 
quietly in the porches of Bethesda, when the streets all 
around were filled with the revelry of innumerable multi- 
tudes, who had come to be present at the annual feast. 
Remember Him pausing to weep over his country's doomed 
metropolis, unexcited, while the giddy crowd around Him 
were shouting " Hosannah to the Son of David!" Remem- 
ber Him in Pilate's judgment -hall, meek, self-possessed, 
standing in the serenity of truth, while all around Him was 
agitation — hesitation in the breast of Pilate, hatred in the 
bosom of the Pharisees, and consternation in the heart of 
the disciples. 

And this, in truth, is what we want : we want the vision 
of a calmer and simpler beauty, to tranquillize us in the 
midst of artificial tastes — we want the draught of a purer 
spring to cool the flame of our excited life ; we want, in 
other words, the Spirit of the life of Christ, simple, natural, 
with power to calm and soothe the feelings Avhich it rouses : 
the fullness of the Spirit which can never intoxicate ! 



X. 
PURITY. 

** Unto the pure all things are pure : but unto them that are defiled and 
unbelieving is nothing pure ; but even then- mind and conscience is defiled. " 
^Titus i. 15. 

For the evils of this world there are two classes of reme- 
dies — one is the world's, the other is God's. The world 
proposes to remedy evil by adjusting the circumstances of 



Purity. 5 1 7 

ttis life to iiian^s desires. The world says, Give us a perfect 
set of circumstances.^ and then we shall have a set of perfect 
men. This principle lies at the root of the system called 
Socialism. Socialism proceeds on the principle that all 
moral and even physical evil arises from unjust laws. If 
the cause be remedied, the effect will be good. But Chris- 
tianity throws aside all that as merely chimerical. It proves 
that the fault is not in outward circumstances but in our- 
selves. Like the wise physician who, instead of busying 
himself with transcendental theories to improve the climate 
and the outward circumstances of man, endeavors to relieve 
and get rid of the tendencies of disease which are from 
within, Christianity, leaving all outward circumstances to 
ameliorate themselves, fastens its attention on the spirit 
which has to deal with them. Christ has declared that the 
kingdom of heaven is from within. He said to the Pharisee, 
" Ye make clean the outside of the cup and platter, but 
within ye are full of extortion and excess." The remedy for 
all this is a large and liberal charity, so overflowing that 
" unto the jDure all things are pure." To internal purity all 
external things become pure. The principle that St. Paul has 
here laid down is, that each man is the creator of his own 
world ; he walks in a universe of his own creation. 

As the free air is to one out of health the cause of cold 
and diseased lungs, so to the healthy man it is a source of 
greater vigor. The rotten fruit is sweet to the worm, but 
nauseous to the palate of man. It is the same air and the 
same fruit acting differently upon different beings. To 
different men a different world — to one all pollution, to 
another all purity. To the noble all things are noble, to the 
mean all things are contemptible. 

The subject divides itself into two parts. 

I. The apostle's principle. 
XL The application of the principle. 

Here we have the same principle again ; each man creates 
his OAvn world. Take it in its simplest form. The eye creates 
the outward world it sees. We see not things as they are, 
but as God has made the eye to receive them. 

In its strictest sense, the creation of a new man is the 
creation of a new universe. Conceive an eye so constructed 
as that the planets and all within them should be minutely 
seen, and all that is near should be dim and invisible like 
things seen through a telescope, or as we see through a 
magnifying-glass the plumage of the butterfly and the bloom 
upon the peach ; then it is manifestly clear that we have 



5 1 8 Purity. 

called into existence actually a new creation^ and not new 
objects. The mind's eye creates a world for itself. 

Again, the visible world presents a diiferent aspect to 
each individual man. You will say that the same things you 
see are seen by all — that the forest, the valley, the flood, 
and the sea, are the same to all ; and yet all these things so 
seen, to different minds are a myriad of different universes. 
One man sees in that noble river an emblem of eternity ; he 
closes his lips and feels that God is there. Another sees 
nothing in it but a very convenient road for transporting his 
spices, silks, and merchandise. To one this world appears 
useful, to another beautiful. Whence comes the difference ? 
From the soul within us. It can make of this world a vast 
chaos — " a mighty maze without a plan ;" or a mere ma- 
chine — a collection of lifeless forces ; or it can make it the 
living vesture of God, the tissue through which He can 
become visible to us. In the spirit in which we look on it 
the world is an arena for mere self-advancement, or a place 
for noble deeds, in which self is forgotten and God is all. 

Observe, this effect is traceable even in that produced by 
our different and changeful moods. We make and unmake 
a world more than once in the space of a single day. In 
trifling moods all seems trivial. In serious moods all seems 
solemn. Is the song of the nightingale merry or plaintive ? 
Is it the voice of joy or the harbinger of gloom ? Sometimes 
one, and sometimes the other, according to our different 
moods. We hear the ocean furious or exulting. The 
thunder-claps are grand, or angry, according to the differ- 
ent states of our mind. Nay, the very church-bells chime 
sadly or merrily, as our associations determine. They 
speak the language of our passing moods. The young ad- 
venturer revolving sanguine plans upon the milestones, hears 
them speak to him as God did to Hagar in the wilderness, 
bidding him back to perseverance and greatness. The soul 
spreads its own hue over every thing ; the shroud or wed- 
ding-garment of nature is woven in the loom of our own feel- 
ings. This universe is the express image and direct counter- 
part of the souls that dwell in it. Be noble-minded, and all 
nature replies — I am divine, the child of God ; be thou, too 
His child, and noble. Be mean, and all nature dwindles into 
a contemptible smallness. 

In the second place, there are two ways in which this 
principle is true. To the pure, all things and all persons are 
pure, because their purity makes all seem pure. 

There Ji^re some who go through life complaining of this 
world; they say they have found nothing but treachery and 



Purity, 5 1 9 

deceit ; the poor are ungrateful, and the rich are selfish. Yet 
we do not find such the best men. Experience tells us that 
each man most keenly and unerringly detects in others the 
vice with which he is most familiar himself 

Persons seem to each man what he is himself One who 
suspects hypocrisy in the world is rarely transparent ; the 
man constantly on the watch for cheating is generally dis« 
honest ; he who suspects impurity is prurient. This is the 
principle to which Christ alludes when he says, *' Give alms 
of such things as ye have ; and behold all things are clean 
unto you." 

Have a large charity ! Large " charity hopeth all things." 
Look at that sublime apostle who saw the churches of Ephe- 
sus and Thessalonica pure, because he saw them in his own 
large love, and painted them, not as they were, but as his 
heart filled up the picture ; he viewed them in the light of 
his own nobleness, as representations of his own purity. 

Once more : to the pure all things are pure, as well as all 
persons. That which is natural lies not in things, but in the 
minds of men. There is a difierence between prudery and 
modesty. Prudery detects wrong where no wrong is ; the 
wrong lies in the thoughts, and not in the objects. There 
is something of over-sensitiveness and over-delicacy which 
shows not innocence, but an inflammable imagination. And 
men of the world can not understand that those subjects and 
thoughts which to them are full of torture, can be harmless, 
suggesting nothing evil to the pure in heart. 

Here, however, beware ! No sentence of Scripture is more 
frequently in the lips of persons who permit themselves 
much license, than the text, " To the pure all things are 
pure." Yes, all things natural, but not artificial — scexies 
which pamper the tastes, which excite the senses. Lmo- 
cence feels healthily. To it all nature is pure. But, just as 
the dove trembles at the approach of the hawk, and the 
young calf shudders at the lion never seen before, so inno- 
cence shrinks instinctively from what is wrong by the same 
divine instinct. If that which is wrong seems pure, then the 
heart is not pure but vitiated. To the right-minded all that 
is right in the course of this world seems pure. Abraham, 
looking forward to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, 
entreated that it might be averted, and afterwards acqui- 
esced! To the disordered mind "all things are out of 
course." This is the spirit which pervades the wliole of the 
Ecclesiastes. There were two things which were perpetu- 
ally suggesting themselves to the mind of Solomon ; the in- 
tolerable sameness of this world, and the constant desire foi 



5 20 Purity, 

change. And yet that same world, spread before the serene 
eye of God, was pronounced to be all " very good." 

This disordered universe is the picture of your own mind. 
"We make a wilderness by encouraging artificial wants, by 
creating sensitive and selfish feelings; then we project every 
thing stamped with the impress of our own feelings, and we 
gather the whole of creation into our own pained being — - 
" the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain togeth- 
er until now." The world you complain of as impure and 
wrong is not God's world, but your world ; the blight, the 
dullness, the blank, are all your own. The light which is in 
you has become darkness, and therefore the light itself is 
dark. 

Again, to the pure all things not only seem pure, but are 
really so because they are made such. 

First, as regards persons. It is a marvellous thing to see 
how a pure and innocent heart purifies all that it approach- 
es. The most ferocious natures are soothed and tamed by 
innocence. And so with human beings, there is a delicacy 
so pure that vicious men in its presence become almost 
pure ; all of purity which is in them is brought out ; like at- 
taches itself to like. The pure heart becomes a centre of at- 
traction round which similar atoms gather, and from which 
dissimilar ones are repelled. A corrupt heart elicits in an 
hour all that is bad in us ; a spiritual one brings out and 
draws to itself all that is best and purest. Such was Christ. 
He stood in the world the Light of the world, to which all 
sparks of light gradually gathered. He stood in the pres- 
ence of impurity, and men became pure. Note this in the 
history of Zaccheus. In answer to the invitation of the Son 
of Man, he says, " Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give 
to the poor, and if I have done wrong to any man I restore 
him fourfold." So also the Scribe, " Well, Master, thou hast 
well said, there is one God, and there is none other than 
He." To the pure Saviour all was pure. " He was lifted 
up on high, and drew all men unto Him." 

Lastly, all situations are pure to the pure. According to 
the world, some professions are reckoned honorable and some 
dishonorable. Men judge according to a standard merely 
conventional, and not by that of moral rectitude. Yet it 
was in truth the men who were in these situations which 
made them such. In the days of the Redeemer the publi- 
can's occupation was a degraded one, merely because low 
base men filled that place. But since He was born into the 
world a poor, laboring man, poverty is noble and dignified, 
and toil is honorable. To the man who feels that " tlie 



Purity. 5 2 1 

king's daughter is all glorious within," no outward situation 
can seem inglorious or impure. 

There are three words which express almost the same 
thing, but whose meaning is entirely different. These are, 
the gibbet, the scaffold, and the cross. So far as we know, 
none die on the gibbet but men of dishonorable and base 
life. The scaffold suggests to our minds the noble deaths of 
our greatest martyrs. The cross was once a gibbet, but it 
is now the highest name we have, because He hung on it. 
Christ has purified and ennobled the cross. This principle 
runs through life. It is not the situation which makes the 
man, but the man who makes the situation. The slave may 
be a freeman. The monarch may be a slave. Situations are 
noble or ignoble, as we make them. 

From all this subject we learn to understand two things. 
Hence we understand the Fall. When man fell, the world 
fell with him. All creation received a shock. Thorns, 
briers, and thistles, sprang up. They were there before, but 
to the now restless and impatient hands of men they became 
obstacles and weeds. Death, which must ever have existed 
as a form of dissolution, a passing from one state to another, 
became a curse ; the sting of death was sin — unchanged in 
itself, it changed in man. A dark heavy cloud rested on it — 
the shadow of his own guilty he^rt. 

Hence, too, we understand the Millennium. The Bible 
says that these things are not to be forever. There are 
glorious things to come. Just as in my former illustration, 
the alteration of the eye called new worlds into being, so 
now nothing more is needed than to re-create the soul — the 
mirror on which all things are reflected. Then is realized 
the prophecy of Isaiah, " Behold, I create all things new^," 
" new heavens and a new earth." 

The conclusion of this verse proves to us why all these new 
creations were called into being — " wherein dwelleth right- 
eousness." To be righteous makes all things new. We do 
not want a new world, we want new hearts. Let the Spirit 
of God purify society, and to the pure all things will be 
pure. The earth will put off the look of weariness and 
gloom which it has worn so long, and then the glorious lan- 
guage of the prophets will be fulfilled — "The forests will 
break out with singing, and the desert will blossom as the 
rose." 



522 Unity and Peace. 



XI. 

TJOTTY AND PEACR 

*' And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye ar^ 
sailed in one body ; and be ye thankful." — Col. iii. 15. 

There is something in these words that might surprise 
ns. It might surprise us to find that peace is urged on us as 
a duty. There can be no duty except where there is a mat- 
ter of obedience ; and it might seem to us that peace is a 
something over which we have no power. It is a privilege 
to have peace, but it would appear as if there were no power 
of control within the mind of a man able to insure that peace 
for itself. " Yet," says the apostle, " let the peace of God 
rule in your hearts." 

It would seem to us as if peace were as far beyond our 
own control as happiness. Unquestionably, we are not mas- 
ters, on our own responsibility, of our own happiness. Hap- 
piness is the gratification of every innocent desire ; but it is 
not given to us to insure th*e gratification of every desire ; 
therefore, happiness is not a duty, and it is nowhere written 
in the Scripture, " You must be happy." But we find it 
written by the Apostle Paul, " Be ye thankful," implying, 
therefore, that peace is a duty. The apostle says, " Let the 
peace of God rule in your hearts ;" from which we infer that 
peace is attainable, and within the reach of our own wills ; 
that if there be not repose there is blame ; if there be not 
peace but discord in the heart, there is something wrong. 

This is the more surprising when we remember the cir- 
cumstances under which these words were written. They 
were written from Rome, where the apostle lay in prison, 
daily and hourly expecting a violent death. They were 
written in days of persecution, when false doctrines were 
rife, and religious animosities fierce ; they were written in 
an epistle abounding with the most earnest and eager con- 
troversy, whereby it is therefore implied, that according to 
the conception of the Apostle Paul, it is possible for a Chris- 
tian to live at the very point of death, and in the very midst 
of danger — that it is possible for him to be breathing the at- 
mosphere of religious controversy — it is possible for him to 
be surrounded by bitterness, and even take up the pen of 
controversy himself — and yet his soul shall not lose its own 



Unity and Peace, 523 

deep peace, nor the power of the infinite repose and rest of 
God. Joined with the apostle's command to be at peace, 
we find another doctrine, the doctrine of the unity of the 
Church of Christ. " To the which ye are called in one 
body," in order that ye may be at peace ; in other words, 
the unity of the Church of Christ is the basis on which, and 
on which alone, can be built the possibility of the inward 
peace of individuals. 

And thus, my Christian brethren, our subject divides itself 
into these two simple branches : 

I. The unity of the Church of Christ. 
n. The inward peace of the members of that Church. 

I. The first subject, then, which we have to consider, is 
the unity of the Church of Christ. 

And the first thing we have to do is both clearly to define 
and understand the meaning of that word " unity." I dis- 
tinguish the unity of comprehensiveness from the unity of 
mere singularity. The w^ord one, as oneness, is an ambigu- 
ous word. There is a oneness belonging to the army as well 
as to every soldier in the army. The army is one, and that 
is the oneness of unity ; the soldier is one, but that is the 
oneness of the unit. There is a difierence between the one- 
ness of a body and the oneness of a member of that body. 
The body is many, and a unity of manifold comprehensive- 
ness. An arm or a member of a body is one, but that is the 
unity of singularity. Without unity, my Christian brethren, 
peace must be impossible. There can be no peace in the one 
single soldier of an army. You do not speak of the harmony 
of one member of a body. There is peace in an army, or in 
a kingdom joined with other kingdoms ; there is harmony in 
a member united with other members. There is no peace in 
a unit, there is no possibility of the harmony of that which is 
but one in itself In order to have peace you must have a 
higher unity, and therein consists the unity of God's own 
Being. The unity of God is the basis of the peace of God — ■ 
meaning by the unity of God the comprehensive manifold- 
ness of God, and not merely the singularity in the number 
of God's Being. When the Unitarian speaks of God as one, 
he means simply singularity of number. We mean that He 
is of manifold comprehensiveness — that there is unity be- 
tween His various powers. Amongst the personalities or 
powers of His Being there is no discord, but perfect harmo- 
ny, entire union ; and that, brethren, is repose, the blessed- 
ness of infinite rest, that belongs to the unity of God — " I 
and my Father are one." 



524 Unity and Peace, 

The second thing which we observe respecting this unity 
is, that it subsists between things not similar or alike, but 
things dissimilar or unlike. There is no unity in the sepa- 
rate atoms of a sand-pit ; they are things similar ; there is 
an aggregate or collection of them. Even if they be harden- 
ed in a mass they are not one, they do not form a unity: 
they are simply a mass. There is no unity in a flock of 
sheep : it is simply a repetition of a number of things simi- 
lar to each other. If you strike off from a thousand five 
hundred, or if you strike off nine hundred, there is nothing 
lost of unity, because there never was unity. A flock of one 
thousand or a flock of five is just as much a flock as any oth- 
er number. 

On the other hand, let us turn to the unity of peace which 
the apostle speaks of, and we find it is something different ; 
it is made up of dissimilar members, without which dissimi- 
larity there could be no unity. Each is imperfect in itself, 
each supplying what it has in itself to the deficiencies and 
wants of the other members. So, if you strike off from this 
body any one member, if you cut off an ai'm, or tear out an 
eye, instantly the unity is destroyed ; you have no longer an 
entire and perfect body, there is nothing but a remnant of 
the whole, a part, a portion ; no unity whatever. 

This will help us to understand the unity of the Church 
of Christ. If the ages and the centuries of the Church of 
Christ, if the different Churches whereof it was composed, if 
the different members of each Church, were similar — one in 
this, that they all held the same views, all spoke the same 
words, all viewed truth from the same side, they would have 
no unity ; but would simply be an aggregate of atoms, the 
sand-pit over again — units, multiplied it may be to infinity, 
but you would have no real unity, and therefore no peace. 
No unity — for wherein consists the unity of the Church of 
Christ? The unity of ages, brethren, consists it in this — 
that every age is merely the rej^etition of another age, and 
that which is held in one is held in another? Precisely in 
the same way, that is not the unity of the ages of the Chris- 
tian Church. 

Every century and every age has held a different truth, 
has put forth different fragments of the truth. In early 
ages, for example, by martyrdom was proclaimed the eternal 
sanctity of truth, rather than give up which a man must 

lose his life In our own age it is quite plain those are 

not the themes which engage us, or the truths which we put 
in force now. This age, by its revolutions, its socialisms, 
proclaims another truth— the brotherhood of the Church of 



Unity and PeaU, 525 

Christ ; so that the unity of ages subsists on the same prin- 
ciple as that of the unity of the human body: and just as 
every separate ray — the violet, the blue, and the orange — • 
make up the white ray, so these manifold fragments of truth 
blended together make up the one entire and perfect white 
ray of truth. And with regard to individuals, taking the 
case of the Reformation, it was given to one Church to pro- 
claim that salvation is a thing received, and not local ; to 
another to proclaim justification by faith ; to another the 
sovereignty of God ; to another the supremacy of the Scrip- 
tures ; to another the right of private judgment, the duty of 
the individual conscience. Unite these all, and then you 
have the Reformation one — one in spite of manifoldness ; 
those very varieties by which they have approached this 
proving them to be one. Disjoint them and then you have 
some miserable sect — Calvinism, or Unitarianism ; the unity 
has dispersed. And so again with the unity of the Churches. 
Whereby would w^e produce unity ? Would we force on 
other Churches our Anglicanism? Would we have our 
thirty-nine articles, our creeds, our prayers, our rules and 
regulations, accepted by every Church throughout the 
world ? If that were unity, then in consistency you are 
bound to demand that in God's world there shall be but one 
color instead of the manifold harmony and accordance of 
which this universe is full ; that there should be but one 
chanted note — the one which we conceive most beautiful. 
This is not the unity of the Church of God. The various 
Churches advance different doctrines and truths. The 
Church of Germany something different from those of the 
Church of England. The Church of Rome, even in its idol- 
atry, proclaims truths which we would be glad to seize. By 
the worship of the Virgin, the purity of women ; by the rig- 
or of ecclesiastical ordinances, the sanctity and permanence 
of eternal order ; by the very priesthood itself, the necessity 
of the guidance of man by man. N"ay, even the dissenting 
bodies themselves — mere atoms of aggregates as they are — 
stand forward and proclaim at least this truth, the separate- 
ness of the individual conscience, the right of independence. 
Peace subsists not between things exactly alike. We do 
not speak of peace in a single country. We say peace sub- 
sists between different countries where war might be. There 
can be no peace between two men who agree in every thing ; 
peace subsists between those who differ. There is no peace 
between Baptist and Baptist; so far as they are Baptists, 
there is perfect accordance and agreement. There may be 
peace between you and the Romanist, the Jew, or the Dis- 



526 Unity a7td Peace, 

senter, because ihere are angles of sharpness which might 
come into collision if they were not subdued and softened by 
the power of love. It was given to the Apostle Paul to dis- 
cern that this was the ground of unity. In the Church of 
Christ he saw men with different views, and he said, So far 
from that variety destroying unity, it was the only ground 
of unity. There are many doctrines, all of them different, 
but let those varieties be blended together — in other words, 
let there be the peace of love, and then you will have unity. 

Once more : this unity, whereof the apostle speaks, consists 
in submission to one single influence or spirit. Wherein 
consists the unity of the body ? Consists it not in this — that 
there is one life uniting, making all the separate members 
one ? Take a way the life, and the members fall to pieces : 
they are no longer one; decomposition begins, and every 
element separates, no longer having any principle of cohe- 
sion or union with the rest. 

There is not one of us who, at some time or other, has not 
been struck with the power there is in a single living influ- 
ence. Have we never, for instance, felt the power where- 
with the orator unites and holds together a thousand men as 
if they were but one ; with flashing eyes and throbbing 
hearts, all attentive to his Avords, and by the diff*erence of 
their attitudes, by the variety of the expressions of their 
countenances, testifying to the unity of that single living 
feeling with which he had inspired them? Whether it be 
indignation, whether it be compassion, or whether it be en- 
thusiasm, that one living influence made the thousand, for the 
time, one. Have we not heard how, even in this century iij 
which we live, the various and conflicting feelings of the 
people of this country were concentrated into one, when the 
threat of foreign invasion had fused down and broken the 
edges of conflict and variance, and from shore to shore was 
heard one cry of terrible defiance, and the difierent classes 
and orders of this manifold and mighty England were as 
one ? Have we not heard how the mighty wdnds hold to- 
gether as if one, the various atoms of the desert, so that they 
rush like a living thing across the wilderness? And this, 
brethren, is the unity of the Church of Christ, the subjection 
to the one uniting Spirit of its God. 

It will be said, in reply to this, " Why, this is mere enthu- 
siasm. It may be very beautiful in theory, but it is impossi- 
ble in practice. It is mere enthusiasm to believe, that while 
all these varieties of conflicting opinion remain, we can have 
unity ; it is mere enthusiasm to think that so long as men's 
minds reckon on a thing like unity, there can be a thing lik« 



Unity and Peace, 527 

oneness." And our reply is, Give us the Spirit of God, and 
we shall be one. You can not produce a unity by all the 
rigor of your ecclesiastical discipline. You can not produce 
a unity by consenting in some form of expression such as 
this, " Let us agree to differ." You can not produce a unity 
by Parliamentary regulations or enactments, bidding back 
the waves of what is called aggression. Give us the living 
Spirit of God, and we shall be one. 

Once on this earth was exhibited, as it were, a specimen of 
perfect anticipation of such a unity, when the " rushing 
mighty wind" of Pentecost came down in the tongues of fire 
and sat on every man ; when the Parthians, and Medes, and 
Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, the " Cretes and 
Arabians," the Jew and the Gentile, each speaking one lan- 
guage, yet blended and fused into one unity by enthusiastic 
love, heard one another speak, as it were, in one language, 
the manifold works of God; when the spirit of giving was 
substituted for the spirit of mere rivalry and competition, 
and no man said the things he had were his own, but all 
shared in common. Let that spirit come again, as come it 
will, and come it must; and then, beneath the influences of a 
mightier love, we shall have a nobler and a more real unity. 

We pass on now, in the second place, to consider the indi- 
vidual peace resulting from this unity. As we have endeav- 
ored to explain what is meant by unity, so now let us en- 
deavor to understand what is meant by peace. Peace, then, 
is the opposite of passion, and of labor, toil, and effort. 
Peace is that state in which there are no desires madly de- 
manding an impossible gratification ; that state in which 
there is no misery, no remorse, no sting. And there are but 
three things which can break that peace. The first is dis- 
cord between the mind of man and the lot which he is called 
on to inherit ; the second is discord between the affections 
and powers of the soul ; and the third is doubt of the recti- 
tude and justice and love wherewith this world is ordered. 
But where these things exist not, where a man is contented 
with his lot, Avhere tbe flesh is subdued to the spirit, and 
where he believes and feels with all his heart that all is right, 
there is peace, and to this, says the apostle, " ye are called" 
— the grand, peculiar call of Chiistianity — the call, " Come 
unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will 
give you rest." 

This was the dying bequest of Christ : " Peace I leave with 
you, my peace I give unto you : not as the world giveth give 
I unto you :" and therein lies one of the greatest truths of 
the blessed and eternal character of Christianity, that it ap- 



528 Unity and Peace, 

plies to, and satisfies the very deepest want and craving of 
our nature. The deepest want of man is not a desire foi 
happiness, but a craving for peace ; not a wish foi the grati- 
fication of every desire, but a craving for the rt^^ose of ac- 
quiescence in the will of God ; and it is this which Christiani- 
ty promises. Christianity does not promise happiness, but it 
does promise peace. "In the world ye shall have tribula- 
tion," saith our Master, " but be of good cheer ; I have over- 
come the world." Now, let us look more closely into this 
peace. 

The first thing we see respecting it is, that it is called 
God's peace. God is rest : the infinite nature of God is in- 
finite repose. The "Z am " of God is contrasted with the / 
am become of all other things. Every thing else is in a state 
of becoming^ God is in a state of being. The acorn has be' 
come the plant, and the plant has become the oak. The 
child has become the man, and the man has become good, or 
wise, or whatever else it may be. God ever is ; and I pray 
you once more to observe, that this peace of God, this eter- 
nal rest in the Almighty Being, arises out of His unity. Not 
because He is a unit, but because He is a unity. There is 
no discord between the powers and attributes of the mind of 
God; there is no discord between His justice and His love; 
there is no discord demanding some miserable expedient to 
unite them together, such as some theologians imagined when 
they described the sacrifice and atonement of our Redeemer 
by saying, it is the clever expedient whereby God reconciles 
His justice with His love. God's justice and love are one. 
Infinite justice must be infinite love. Justice is but another 
sign of love. The infinite rest of the "Z am " of God arises 
out of the harmony of His attributes. 

The next thing we observe respecting this divine peace 
which has come doAvn to man on earth is, that it is a living 
peace. Brethren, let us distinguish. There are several things 
called peace which are by no means Divine or Godlike peace. 
There is peace, for example, in the man who lives for and en- 
joys self, with no nobler aspiration goading him on to make 
him feel the rest of God; that is peace, but that is merely 
the peace of toil. There is rest on the surface of the cav- 
erned lake, which no wind can stir ; but that is the peace of 
stagnation. There is peace amongst the stones which have 
fallen and rolled down the mountain's side, and lie there 
quietly at rest ; but that is the peace of inanity. There is 
peace in the hearts of enemies who lie together, side by side, 
in ihe same trench of the battle-field, the animosities of their 
souls silenced at length, and their hands no longer cleiichQd 



Unity and Peace. 529 

In deadly enmity against each other ; but that is the peace 
of death. If our peace be but the peace of the sensualist sat- 
isfying pleasure, if it be but the peace of mental torpor and 
inaction, the peace of apathy, or the peace of the soul dead 
in trespasses and sins, we may whisper to ourselves, " Peace, 
peace," but there will be no peace; there is not the peace of 
unity nor the peace of God, for the peace of God is the living 
peace of love. 

The next thing we observe respecting this peace is, that it 
is the manifestation of power — it is the peace which comes 
from an inward power : " Let the peace of God," says the 
apostle, " rule within your hearts." For it is a power, the 
manifestation of strength. There is no peace except there is 
the possibility of the opposite of peace, although now restrain- 
ed and controlled. You do not speak of the peace of a grain 
of sand, because it can not be otherwise than merely insignifi- 
cant, and at rest. You do not speak of the peace of a mere 
pond ; you speak of the peace of the sea, because there is the 
opposite of peace implied, there is power and strength. 
And this, brethren, is the real character of the peace in the 
mind and soul of man. Oh ! we make a great mistake when 
we say there is strength in passion, in the exhibition of emo- 
tion. Passion, and emotion, and all those outward manifest- 
ations, prove, not strength, but weakness. If the passions of 
a man are strong, it proves the man himself is weak if he can 
not restrain or control his passions. The real strength and 
majesty of the soul of man is calmness, the manifestation of 
strength ; " the peace of God " ruling ; the word of Christ 
saying to the inward storms, " Peace !" and there is " a great 
calm." 

Lastly, the peace of which the apostle speaks is the peace 
that is received — the peace of reception. You will observe^ 
throughout this passage the apostle speaks of a something 
received, and not done : " Let the peace of God rule in your 
hearts." It is throughout receptive, but by no means inact- 
ive. And according to this, there are two kinds of peace ; 
the peace of obedience — " Let the peace of God rule " you ; 
and there is the peace of gratefulness — "Be ye thankful." 
V^ery great, brethren, is the peace of obedience : when a man 
nas his lot fixed, and his mind made up, and he sees his des- 
tiny before him, and quietly acquiesces in it, his spirit is at 
rest. Great and deep is the peace of the soldier to whom 
has been assigned even an untenable position, with the com- 
mand, " Keep that, even if you die," and he obediently re« 
mains to die. 

Qr^at was the peace of Elisha — very, very calm are thosQ 



530 The Christian Aim. and Motive, 

words by whicli he expressed his acquiescence in the Diving 
will. " Knowest thou," said the troubled, excited, and rest- 
less men around him — " Knowest thou that the Lord will 
take away thy master from thy head to-day?" He answered, 
"Yea, I know it; hold ye your peace." Then there is the 
other peace, it is the peace of gratefulness : " Be ye thank- 
ful." It is that peace which the Israelites had when these 
words were spoken to them on the shores of the Red Sea, 
while the bodies of their enemies floated past them, de- 
stroyed, but not by them : " Stand still and see the salvation 
of the Lord." 

And here, brethren, is another mistake of ours : we look 
on salvation as a thing to be done, and not received. In 
God's salvation we can do but little, but there is a great 
deal to be received. We are here, not merely to act, but to 
be acted upon. " Let the peace of God rule in your hearts ;" 
there is a peace that will enter there, if you do not thwart it ; 
there is a Spirit that will take possession of your soul, pro- 
vided that you do not quench it. In this world we are re- 
cipients, not creators. In obedience and in gratefulness, and 
the infinite peace of God in the soul of man, is alone to be 
found deep calm repose. 



XII. 
THE CHRISTIAN AIM AND MOTIVE. 

"Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is per- 
fect."— Matt. V. 48. 

There are two erroneous views held respecting the char- 
acter of the Sermon on the Mount. The first may be called 
an error of worldly-minded men, the other an error of mis- 
taken religionists. Worldly-minded men — men, that is, in 
whom the devotional feeling is but feeble — are accustomed 
to look upon morality as the whole of religion ; and they 
suppose that the Sermon on the Mount was designed only to 
explain and enforce correct principles of morality. It tells 
of human duties and human proprieties, and an attention to 
these, they maintain, is the only religion which is required 
by it. Strange, my Christian brethren, that men whose lives 
are least remarkable for superhuman excellence, should be 
the very men to refer most frequently to those sublime com- 
ments on Christian principle, and should so confidently con- 



The Christian Aim and Motive, 531 

elude from thence, that themselves are right and all others 
are wrong. Yet so it is. 

The other is an error of mistaken religionists. They some- 
times regard the Sermon on the Mount as if it were a col- 
lection of moral precepts, and consequently, strictly speaking, 
not Christianity at all. To them it seems as if the chief 
value, the chief intention of the discourse, was to show the 
breadth and spirituality of the requirements of the law of 
Moses ; its chief religious significance, to show the utter im- 
possibility of fulfilling the law, and thus to lead to the nec- 
essary inference that justification must be by faith alone. 
And so they would not scruple to assert that, in the highest 
sense of that term, it is not Christianity at all, but only 
preparatory to it — a kind of spiritual Judaism ; and that the 
higher and more developed principles of Christianity are to 
be found in the writings of the apostles. Before we proceed 
further, we would remark here that it seems extremely start- 
ling to say that He who came to this world expressly to 
preach the Gospel, should, in the most elaborate of all His 
discourses, omit to do so : it is indeed something more than 
startling, it is absolutely revolting, to suppose that the let- 
ters of those who spoke o/" Christ, should contain a more per- 
fectly-developed, a freer and fuller Christianity than is to be 
found in Christ's own words. 

Now you will observe that these two parties, so opposed 
to each other in their general religious views, are agreed in 
this — that the Sermon on the Mount is nothing but morality. 
The man of the world says — " It is morality only, and that 
is the whole of religion." The mistaken religionist says — • 
"It is morality only, not the entire essence of Christian- 
ity." In opposition to both these views, we maintain that 
the Sermon on the Mount contains the sum and substance 
of Christianity — the very chief matter of the Gospel of our 
Redeemer. 

It is not, you will observe, a pure and spiritualized Juda- 
ism ; it'is contrasted with Judaism again and again by Him 
who spoke it. Quoting the words of Moses, He afiirmed, " So 
was it spoken by them of old time, but I say unto you — " 
For example, " Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt 
perform unto the Lord thine oaths." That is Judaism. " But 
I say unto you. Swear not at all, but let your yea be yea, 
and your nay nay." That is Christianity. And that which 
is the essential peculiarity of this Christianity lies in these 
two things. First of all, that the morality which it teaches 
is disinterested goodness — goodness not for the sake of the 
blessing that follows it, but for its own sake, and because i« 



53^ The Christian Aim and Motive. 

is right. " Love your enemies," is the Gospel precept. Why t 
• — Because if you love them you shall be blessed ; and if you 
do not, cursed ? No ; but " Love your enemies, bless them 
that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for 
them which despitefuUy use you and persecute you, that ye 
may be the children of" — that is, may be like — " your Fa- 
ther which is in heaven." The second essential peculiarity 
of Christianity — and this, too, is an essential peculiarity of 
this sermon, is that it teaches and enforces the law of self- 
sacrifice. " If thy right eye ofiend thee, pluck it out ; if thy 
right hand ofiend thee, cut it ofi"." This, brethren, is the law 
of self-sacrifice — the very law and spirit of the blessed cross 
of Christ. 

How deeply and essentially Christian, then, this Sermon 
on the Mount is, we shall understand if we are enabled in 
any measure to reach the meaning and spirit of the single 
passage which I have taken as my text. It tells two things 
— the Christian aim and the Christian motive. 

I. The Christian aim — perfection. 

n. The Christian motive — because it is right and Godlike 
to be perfect. 

I. The Christian aim is this — to be perfect. " Be ye there 
fore perfect." Now distinguish this, I pray you, from mere 
worldly morality. It is not conformity to a creed that is 
here required, but aspiration after a state. It is not de- 
manded of us to perform a number of duties, but to yield 
obedience to a certain spiritual law. But let us endeavor to 
explain this more fully. What is the meaning of this 
expression, "Be ye perfect?" Why is it that in this dis- 
course, instead of being commanded to perform religious du- 
ties, we are commanded to think of being like God ? Will 
not that inflame our pride, and increase our natural vain- 
glory ? Now the nature and possibility of human perfection, 
what it is and how it is possible, are both contamed in one 
single expression in the text, "Even as your Father which is 
in heaven is perfect." The relationship between father and 
son implies consanguinity, likeness, similarity of character 
and nature. God made the insect, the stone, the lily, but God 
is not the Father of the caterpillar, the lily, or the stone. 

When, therefore, God is said to be our Father, something 
more is implied in this than that God created man. And so 
when the Son of Man came proclaiming the fact that we are 
the children of God it was in the truest sense a revelation. 
He told us that the nature of God resembles the natui'e of 
man, that love in God is not a mere figure of speech, but 



The Christian Aim and Motive, 533 

means the same thing as love in us, and that Divine anger is 
the same thing as human anger divested of its emotions and 
imperfections. When we are commanded to be like God, it 
implies that God has that nature of which we have already 
the germs. And this has been taught by the incarnation of 
the Redeemer. Things absolutely dissimilar in their nature 
can not mingle. Water can not coalesce with fire — water 
can not mix with oil. If, then, humanity and divinity were 
united in the person of the Redeemer, it follows that there 
must be something kindred between the two, or else the 
incarnation had been impossible. So that the incarnation is 
the realization of man's perfection. 

But let us examine more deeply this assertion, that our 
nature is kindred with that of God — for if man has not a 
nature kindred to God's, then a demand such as that, " Be 
ye the children of" — that is, like — " God," is but a mockery 
of man. We say, then, in the first place, that in the truest 
sense of the word man can be a creator. The beaver makes 
its hole, the bee makes its cell ; man alone has the power of 
creating. The mason makes^ the architect creates. In the 
same sense that we say God created the universe, we say 
that man is also a creator. The creation of the universe was 
the Eternal Thought taking reality. And thought taking 
expression is also a creation. Whenever, therefore, there is 
a living thought shaping itself in word or in stone, there is 
there a ci-eation. And therefore it is that the simplest efibrt 
of what we call genius is prized infinitely more than the most 
elaborate performances w^hich are done by mere workman^ 
ship, and for this reason : that the one is produced by an 
eflTort of power which we share with the beaver and the bee, 
that of making^ and the other by a faculty and power which 
man alone shares with God. 

Here, however, you will observe another difficulty. It 
will be said at once, There is something in this comparison 
of man with God which looks like blasphemy, because one 
is finite and the other infinite — man is bounded, God bound- 
less ; and to speak of resemblance and kindred between 
these two, is to speak of resemblance and kindred between 
two natures essentially different. But this is precisely the 
argument which is brought by the Socinians against the 
doctrine of the incarnation ; and we are bound to add that 
the Socinian argument is right, unless there be the similarity 
of which we have been speaking. Unless there be something 
in man's nature which truly and properly partakes of the 
Divine nature, there could be no incarnation, and the demand 
for perfection would be a mockery and an impossibility. 



534 ^^^ Chris tia7i Aim and Motive, 

Let us then endeavor to find out the evidences of this in« 
finitude in the nature of man. First of all, we find it in this 
■ — that the desires of man are for something boundless and 
unattainable. Thus speaks our Lord — " What shall it profit 
a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his own 
soul ?" Every schoolboy has heard the story of the youth- 
ful prince who enumerated one by one the countries be 
meant to conquer year after year ; and when the enumera- 
tion was completed, was asked what he meant to do when 
all those victories were achieved, and he replied, To sit down, 
to be happy, to take his rest. But then came the ready re- 
joinder, Why not do so now ? But it is not every school- 
boy who has paused to consider the folly of the question. 
He who asked his son why he did not at once take the rest 
which it was his ultimate purpose to enjoy, knew not the im- 
mensity and nobility of the human soul. He could not then 
take his rest and be happy. As long as one realm remained 
unconquered, so long rest was impossible ; he would weep 
for fresh worlds to conquer. And thus, that which was 
spoken by our Lord of one earthly gratification, is true of 
all — " Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again." 
The boundless, endless, infinite void in the soul of man can 
be satisfied with nothing but God. Satisfaction lies not in 
having^ but in being. There is no satisfaction even in doing. 
Man can not be satisfied with his own performances. When 
the righteous young ruler came to Christ, and declared that 
in reference to the life gone by he had kept all the com- 
mandments and fulfilled all the duties required by the law, 
still came the question — " What lack I yet ?" 

The Scribes and Pharisees were the strictest observers of 
the ceremonies of the Jewish religion, " touching the right- 
eousness which is by the law " they were blameless, but yet 
they wanted something more than that, and they were found 
on the brink of Jordan imploring the baptism of John, seek, 
ing after a new and higher state than they had yet attained 
to — a significant proof that man can not be satisfied with his 
own works. And again, there is not one of us who has ever 
been satisfied with his own performances. There is no man 
whose doings are worth any thing, who has not felt that he 
has not yet done that which he feels himself able to do. 
While he was doing it, he was kept up by the spirit of hope ; 
but when done the thing seemed to him worthless. And 
therefore it is that the author can not read his own book 
again, nor the sculptor look with pleasure upon his finished 
work. With respect to one of the greatest of all modern 
Rculptors, we are told that he longed for the termination of 



The Christian Aim and Motive, 535 

his earthly career, for this reason — that he had been satisfied 
with his own performance : satisfied for the first time in his 
life. And this expression of his satisfaction was but equiva- 
lent to saying that he had reached the goal beyond which 
there could be no progress. This impossibility of being sat- 
isfied with his own performances is one of the strongest proofs 
of our immortality — a proof of that perfection towards which 
we shall forever tend, but which we can never attain. 

A second trace of this infinitude in man's nature we find 
in the infinite capacities of the soul. This is true intellectu- 
ally and morally. With reference to our intellectual capa- 
cities, it would perhaps be more strictly correct to say that 
they are indefinite, rather than infinite ; that is, we can affix 
to them no limit. For there is no man, however low his 
intellectual powers may be, who has not at one time or 
another felt a rush of thought, a glow of inspiration, which 
seemed to make all things possible, as if it were merely the 
efiect of some imperfect organization which stood in the way 
of his doing whatever he desired to do. With respect to 
our moral and spiritual capacities, we remark that they are 
not only indefinite, but absolutely infinite. Let that man 
answer who has ever truly and heartily loved another. That 
man knows what it is to partake of the infinitude of God. 
Literally, in the emphatic language of the Apostle John, he 
has felt his immortality — " God in him, and he in God." For 
that moment, infinitude was to him not a name, but a reality. 
He entered into the infinite of time and space, which is not 
measured by days, or months, or years, but is alike boundless 
and eternal. 

Again : we perceive a third trace of this infinitude in man, 
in the power which he possesses of giving up self. In this, 
perhaps more than in any thing else, man may claim kindred 
with God. Nor is this power confined to the best of man- 
kind, but is possessed, to some extent at least, by all. There 
is no man, how low soever he may be, who has not one or 
two causes or secrets, which no earthly consideration would 
induce him to betray. There is no man who does not feel 
towards one or two at least, in this world, a devotion which 
all the bribes of the universe would not be able to shake. 
We have heard the story of that degraded criminal who, 
when sentence of death Avas passed upon him, turned to his 
accomplice in guilt, in whose favor a verdict of acquittal was 
brought in, and in glorious self-forgetfulness exclaimed — ■ 
" Thank God, you are saved !" The savage and barbarous 
Lidian, whose life has been one unbroken series of cruelty 
and crime, will submit to a slow, lingering, torturing death. 



53^ The Christia7i Aim and Motive, 

rather than betray his country. Now, what shall we say to 
these things? Do they not tell of an indestructible some- 
thing in the nature of man, of which the origin is Divine? — 
the remains of a majesty which, though it may be sullied, 
can never be entirely lost ? 

Before passing on let us observe, that were it not for this 
conviction of the Divine origin, and consequent perfectibility 
of our nature, the very thought of God would be painful to 
us. God is so great, so glorious, that the mind is over- 
whelmed by, and shrinks from, the contemj^lation of His ex- 
cellence, unless there comes the tender, ennobling thought 
that we are the children of God, who are to become like our 
Father in heaven, whose blessed career it is to go on in an 
advance of love and duty towards Him, until we love Him 
as we are loved, and know Him almost as we are known. 

n. We pass on, in the second place, to consider the Chris- 
tian motive — "Even as your Father which is in heaven is 
perfect." Brethren, worldly prudence, miscalled morality, 
says — "Be honest; you w^ill find your gain in being so. Do 
right ; you will be the better for it — even in this world you 
will not lose by it." The mistaken religionist only magni- 
fies this on a large scale. " Your duty," he says, " is to save 
your soul. Give up this world to have the next. Lose Aere, 
that you may gain hereafter.'''' Now this is but prudence, 
after all — it is but magnified selfishness, carried on into eter- 
nity — none the more noble for being eternal selfishness. In 
opposition to all such sentiments as these, thus speaks the 
Gospel — "Be ye perfect." Why? "Because your Father 
which is in heaven is perfect." Do right, because it is God- 
like and right so to do. Here, however, let us be understood. 
We do not mean to say that the Gospel ignores altogether 
the personal results of doing right. This would be unnat- 
ural — because God has linked together well-doing and bless- 
edness. But we do say that this blessedness is not the mo- 
tive which the Gospel gives us. It is true the Gospel says 
— " Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth ; 
blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy ; blessed 
are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for 
they shall be filled." But when these are made our motives — 
when we become meek in order that we may inherit here — 
then the promised enjoyment will not come. If we are mer- 
ciful merely that we may ourselves obtain mercy, we shall 
not have that indwelling love of God which is the result 
and token of His forgiveness. Such was the law and such 
the example of our Lord and Master. 



The Christian Aim and Motive. 537 

True it is that in the prosecution of the great work of re- 
demption He had " respect to the recompense of reward." 
True it is He was conscious — how could He but be conscious 
— that when His work was completed He should be " glori- 
fied with that glory which He had with the Father before 
the world began ;" but we deny that this was the motive 
which induced Him to undertake that work ; and that man 
has a very mistaken idea of the character of the Redeemer, 
and understands but little of His spirit, who has so mean an 
opinion of Him as to suppose that it was any consideration 
of personal happiness and blessedness which led the Son of 
God to die. "For this end was He born, and for this end 
came He into the world to bear witness unto the truth," and 
** to finish the work which was given Him to do." 

If we were asked, Can you select one text in which more 
than in any other this unselfish, disinterested feature comes 
forth, it should be this, " Love ye your enemies, do good and 
lend, hoping for nothing again." This is the true spirit of 
Christianity — doing right disinterestedly, not from the hope 
of any personal advantage or reward, either temporal or spir- 
itual, but entirely forgetting self, "hoping for nothing again." 
When that glorious philanthropist, whose whole life had been 
spent in procuring the abolition of the slave-trade, was de- 
manded of, by some systematic theologian, whether in his ar- 
dor in this great cause he had not been neglecting his per- 
sonal prospects and endangering his own soul, this was his 
magnanimous reply — one of those which show the light of 
truth breaking through like an inspiration : he said, " I did 
not think about my own soul, I had no time to think about 
myself, I had forgotten all about my soul." The Christian 
is not concerned about his own happiness ; he has not time 
to consider himself; he has not time to put that selfish ques- 
tion which the disciples put to their Lord when they were 
but half baptized with His spirit, " Lo, we have left all and 
followed Thee, what shall we have therefore ?" 

In conclusion we observe, there are two things which are 
to be learned from this passage. The first is this, that hap- 
piness is not our end and aim. It has been said, and has . 
since been repeated as frequently as if it were an indisputa- 
ble axiom, that "happiness is our being's end and aim." 
Brethren, happiness is 7iot our being's end and aim. The 
Christian's aim is perfection, not happiness, and every one of 
the sons of God must have something of that spirit which 
marked their Master ; that holy sadness, that peculiar unrest, 
that high and lofty melancholy which belongs to a spirit 
which strives after heights to which it can never attain. 



53B The Christian Aim and Motive, 

The second thing we have to learn is this, that on thia 
earth there can be no rest for man. By rest we mean the at- 
tainment of a state beyond which there can be no change. 
Politically, morally, spiritually, there can be no rest for man 
here. In one country alone has that system been fully car- 
ried out which, conservative of the past, excludes all desire 
of progress and improvement for the future : but it is not to 
China that we should look for the perfection of human socie- 
ty. There is one ecclesiastical system which carries out the 
same spirit, looking rather to the Church of the past than to 
the Church of the future ; but it is not in the Romish that 
we shall find the model of a Christian Church. In Paradise 
it may have been right to be at rest, to desire no change; but 
ever since the Fall, every system that tends to check the on- 
ward progress of mankind is fatally, radically, curelessly 
wrong. The motto on every Christian banner is " Forward.'* 
There is no resting in the present, no satisfaction in the past. 

The last thing we learn from this is the impossibility of 
obtaining that of which some men speak — the satisfaction of 
a good conscience. Some men write and speak as if the dif- 
ference between the Christian and the worldly man was this, 
that in the one conscience is a self-reproaching hell, and in 
the other a self-congratulating heaven. Oh, brethren, is this 
the fact ? Think you that the Christian goes home at night 
counting up the noble deeds done during the day, saying to 
himself, " Well done, good and faithful servant ?" Brethren, 
that habit of looking forward to the future prevents all pride 
and self-righteousness, and makes our best and only rest and 
satisfaction to consist in contemplating the future which is 
bringing us nearer and nearer home. Our motto, therefore, 
must be that striking one of the Apostle Paul, " Forgetting 
those things which are behind, and reaching forth to those 
things which are before, I press towards the mark for th? 
prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." 



Christian Casuistry. 539 



xin. 
CHRISTIAN CASUISTRY. 

*'Is any man called being circumcised? let him not become un circumcised. 
Is any called in uncircumcision ? let him not be circumcised. Circumcision 
is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the command- 
ments of God, Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was 
called. Art thou called being a servant ? care not for it : but if thou mayest 
be made free, use it rather. For he that is called in the Lord, being a serv- 
ant, is the Lord's freeman : likewise also he that is called, being free, is 
Christ's sen-ant. Ye are bought with a price ; be not ye the servants of men. 
Brethren, let everv man, wherein he is called, therein abide with God.' — 
1 Cor. vii. 18-24. ' 

The whole of these seven chapters of the First Epistle of 
the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, is occupied with ques- 
tions of Christian casuistry. In the application of the prin- 
ciples of Christianity to the varying circumstances of life in- 
numerable difficulties had arisen, and the Corinthians upon 
these difficulties had put certain questions to the Apostle 
Paul. This seventh chapter contains the apostle's answer to 
many of these questions. There are, however, two great di- 
visions into which these answers generally fall. St. Paul 
makes a distinction between those things which he speaks 
by commandment and those which he speaks only by per- 
mission ; there is a distinction between what he says as from 
the Lord, and what only from himself; between that which 
he speaks to them as being taught of God, and that which 
he speaks only as a servant, " called of the Lord and faith- 
ful." 

It is manifestly plain that there are many questions in which 
right and ii^rong are not variable, but indissoluble and fixed ; 
while there are questions, on the other hand, where these 
terms are not fixed, but variable, fluctuating, altering, de- 
pendent upon circumstances. As, for instance, those in which 
the apostle teaches in the present chapter the several duties 
and advantages of marriage and celibacy. There may be cir- 
cumstances in Tv*hich it is the duty of a Christian man to be 
married, there are others in which it may be his duty to re- 
main unmarried. For instance, in the case of a missionary 
it may be right to be married rather than unmarried ; on the 
other hand, in the case of a pauper, not having the where- 
withal to bring up and maintain a family, it may be proper 



540 Christian Casuistry, 

to remain unmarried. You will observe, however, that no 
fixed law can be laid down upon this subject. We can not 
Bay marriage is a Christian duty ; nor celibacy is a Christian 
duty ; nor that it is in every case the duty of a missionary to 
be married, or of a pauper to be unmarried. All these things 
must vary according to circumstances, and the duty must be 
stated not universally, but w^ith reference to those circum- 
stances. 

1 These, therefore, are questions of casuistry, which depend 
upon the particular case : from which word the term " casu- 
istry " is derived. On these points the apostle speaks not 
by commandment, but by permission : not as speaking by 
God's command, but as having the Spirit of God. A dis- 
tinction has sometimes beep drawn with reference to this 
chapter between that whicn tne apostle speaks by inspira- 
tion, and what he speaks as a man uninspired. The distinc- 
tion, however, is an altogether false one, and beside the ques- 
tion. For the real distinction is not between the inspired 
and uninspired, but between a decision in matters of Chris- 
tian duty and advice in matters of Christian prudence. It is 
abundantly evident that God can not give advice ; He can 
only issue a command. God can not say, " It is better to do 
this ;" His perfections demand something absolute : " Thou 
shalt do this ; thou shalt not do this." Whensoever, there- 
fore, we come to advice, there is introduced the human ele- 
ment rather than the Divine. In all such cases, therefore, as 
are dependent upon circumstances the apostle speaks not as 
inspired, but as uninspired ; as one whose judgment we have 
no right to find fault with or to cavil at, who lays down 
what is a matter of Christian prudence, and not a bounden 
and universal duty. The matter of the present discourse 
will take in various verses in this chapter — from the tenth 
to the twenty-fourth verse — leaving part of the commence 
ment and the conclusion for our consideration, if God permit, 
next Sunday. 

There are three main questions on which the apostle here 
gives his inspired decision. The first decision is concerning 
the sanctity of the marriage-bond between two Christians. 
His verdict is given in the tenth verse : " Unto the married 
I command, yet not I, but the Lord, Let not the wife depart 
from her husband." He lays down this pfinciple, that the 
union is an indissoluble one. 

Upon such a subject, Christian brethren, before a mixed 
congregation, it is manifestly evident that we can only speak 
in general terms. It will be sufficient to say that marriage 
Ib of all earthly unions almost the only one permitting of no 



Christian Casuistry, 541 

change but that of death. It is that engagement in whict 
man exerts his most awful and solemn power — the power of 
responsibility which belongs to him as one that shall give 
account — the power of abnegating the right to change — the 
power of parting with his freedom — the power of doing that 
which in this world can never be reversed. And yet it is 
perhaps that relationship which is spoken of most frivolously, 
and entered into most carelessly and most wantonly. It is 
not a union merely between two creatures, it is a union 
between two spirits ; and the intention of that bond is to 
perfect the nature of both, by supplementing their deficien- 
cies with the force of contrast, giving to each sex those ex- 
cellencies in which it is naturally deficient ; to the one 
strength of character and firmness of moral will, to the other 
sympathy, meekness, tenderness. And just so solemn, and 
just so glorious as these ends are for which the union was 
contemplated and intended, just so terrible are the conse- 
quences if it be perverted and abused. For there is no 
earthly relationship which has so much powder to ennoble 
and to exalt. Very strong language does the apostle use in 
this chapter respecting it : " What knowest thou, oh wife, 
whether thou shalt save thy husband ? or how knowest thou, 
oh man, whether thou shalt save thy wife ?" The very pow- 
er oi saving belongs to this relationship. And on the other 
hand, there is no earthly relationship which has so much power 
to wreck and ruin the soul. For there are two rocks in this 
world of ours on which the soul must either anchor or be 
wrecked. The one is God ; the other is the sex opposite 
to itself The one is the " Rock of Ages," on which if the 
human soul anchors it lives the blessed life of faith; against 
which if the soul be dashed and broken, there ensues the 
WTeck of Atheism — the worst ruin of the soul. The other 
rock is of another character. Blessed is the man, blessed is 
the woman, whose life-experience has taught a confiding be- 
lief in the excellencies of the sex opposite to their own— a 
blessedness second only to the blessedness of salvation. 
And the ruin in the other case is second only to the ruin of 
everlasting perdition — the same wreck and ruin of the soul. 

These, then, are the two tremendous alternatives ; on the 
one hand the possibility of securing, in all sympathy and 
tenderness, the laying of that step on Avhich man rises to- 
wards his perfection ; on the other hand the blight of all 
sympathy, to be dragged down to earth, and forced to be 
come frivolous and commonplace ; to lose all zest and ear- 
nestness in life, to have heart and life degraded by mean and 
perpetually-recurring sources of disagreement \ these are the 



542 Christian Casuistry, 

two alternatives, and it is the worst of these alternatives 
which the young risk when they form an inconsiderate union 
— excusably indeed, because through inexperience ; and it is 
the worst of these alternatives which parents risk — not ex- 
cusably but inexcusably — when they bring up their children 
with no higher view of what that tie is, than the merely pru- 
dential one of a rich and honorable marriage. 

The second decision which the apostle makes respecting 
another of the questions proposed to him by the Corinthians 
is, as to the sanctity of the marriage bond between a Chris- 
tian and one who is a heathen. When Christianity first 
entered into our world, and was little understood, it seemed 
to threaten the dislocation and alteration of all existing rela- 
tionships. Many difficulties arose ; such, for instance, as the 
one here started. When of two heathen parties only one 
was converted to Christianity, the question arose. What in 
this case is the duty of the Christian? Is not the duty sepa- 
ration ? Is not the marriage in itself null and void ? as if it 
were a union between one dead and one living? And that 
perpetual contact with a heathen, and therefore an enemy of 
God, is not that, in a relation so close and intimate, perpetual 
defilement ? The apostle decides this with his usual inspired 
wisdom. He decides that the marriage bond is sacred still. 
Diversities of religious opinion, even the farthest and widest 
diversity, can not sanction separation. And so he decides in 
the 13th verse, "The woman which hath a husband that be- 
lieveth not, if he be pleased to dwell with her, let her not 
leave him." And, " If any brother hath a wife that believeth 
not, and she be pleased to dwell with him, let him not put 
her away " (ver. 12). 

Now for us in the present day the decision on this point 
is not of so much importance as the reason which is adduced 
in support of it. The proof which the apostle gives of the 
sanctity of the marriage is exceedingly remarkable. Practi- 
cally it amounts to this : If this were no marriage, but an un- 
hallowed alliance, it would follow as a necessary consequence 
that the ofi*spring could not be reckoned in any sense as the 
children of God ; but, on the other hand, it is the instinctive, 
unwavering conviction of every Christian parent, united 
though he or she may be to a heathen, "My child is a child 
of God," or, in the Jewish form of expression, " My child is 
cleaiiy So the apostle says, " The unbelieving husband is 
sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified 
by the husband • else were your children unclean ; but now 
they are holy," for it follows if the children are holy in this 
Bense of dedicated to God, and are capable of Christian rela' 



Christian Casuistry, 543 

tionship, then the marriage relation was not unhallowed, but 
sacred and indissoluble. 

The value of this argument in the present day depends on 
its relation to baptism. The great question we are deciding 
in the present day may be reduced to a very few words. 
This question — the baptismal question — is this : — whether we 
are baptized because we are the children of God, or, whether 
we are the children of God because we are baptized; wheth- 
er, in other words, when the Catechism of the Church of Eng- 
land says that by baptism we are " made the children of 
God," we are to understand thereby that we are made some- 
thing which we were not before — magically and mysterious- 
ly changed ; or, whether we are to understand that we are 
made the children of God by baptism in the same sense that 
a sovereign is made a sovereign by coronation. Here the 
apostle's argument is full, decisive, and unanswerable. He 
does not say that these children were Christian, or clean, be- 
cause they were baptised, but they were the children of God 
because they were the children of one Christian parent ; nay, 
more than that, such children could scarcely ever have been 
baptized, because, if the rite met with opposition from one 
of the parents, it would be an entire and perfect veto to the 
possibility of baptism. You will observe that the very fun- 
damental idea out of which infant-baptism arises is, that the 
impression produced upon the mind and character of the 
child by the Christian parent makes the child one of a Chris- 
tian community; and therefore, as Peter argued that Cor- 
nelius had received the Holy Ghost, and so was to be bap- 
tized, just in the same w^ay, as they are adopted into the 
Christian family and receive a Christian impression, the chil- 
dren of Christian parents are also to be baptized. 

Observe, also, the important truth which comes out collater- 
ally from this argument — namely, the sacredness of the im- 
pression which arises from the close connection between pa- 
rent and child. Stronger far than education — going on before 
education can commence, possibly from the very first mo- 
ments of consciousness, we begin to impress ourselves on our 
children. Our character, voice, features, qualities — modified, 
no doubt, by entering into a new human being, and into a 
different organization — are impressed upon our children. 
Not the inculcation of opinions, but much rather the forma- 
tion of principles, and of the tone of character, the derivation 
of qualities. Physiologists tell us of the derivation of the 
mental qualities from the father, and of the moral from the 
mother. But be this as it may, there is scarcely one here 
who can not trace back his present religious character to 



544 Christian Casuzshy, 

some impression, in early life, from one or other of his parents 
' — a tone, a look, a word, a habit, or even, it may be, a bit- 
ter, miserable exclamation of remorse. 

The third decision which the apostle gives, the third prin- 
ciple which he lays down, is but the development of the last. 
(Jhristianity, he says, does not interfere with existing rela- 
tionships. First he lays down the principle, and then unfolds 
the principle in two ways, ecclesiastically and civilly. The 
principle he lays down in almost every variety of form. In" 
the 1 7th verse, " As God hath distributed to every man, as 
the Lord hath called every one, so let him walk." In the 
20th verse, " Let every man abide in the same calling where- 
in he was called." In the 24th verse, " Brethren, let every 
man wherein he is called therein abide with God." This is 
the principle. Christianity was not to interfere with exist- 
ing relationships ; Christian men were to remain in those re- 
lationships in which they were, and in them to develop the 
inward spirituality of the Christian life. Then he applies 
this principle in two w^ays. First of all, ecclesiastically. 
With respect to their church, or ecclesiastical affairs, he says 
— " Is any man called being circumcised ? Let him not be- 
come uncircumcised. Is any man in uncircumcision ? Let 
him not be circumcised." In other words, the Jews, after 
their conversion, were to continue Jews, if they would. 
Christianity required no change in these outward things, for 
it was not in these that the depth and reality of the kingdom 
of Christ consisted. So the Apostle Paul took Timothy and 
circumcised him ; so also he used all the Jewish customs 
with which he was familiar, and performed a vow, as related 
in the Acts of the Apostles, '' having shorn his head in Cen- 
chrea ; for he had a vow." It was not his opinion that it 
was the duty of a Christian to overthrow the Jewish system. 
He knew that the Jewish system could not last, but what he 
wanted was to vitalize the system — to throw into it not a 
Jewish, but a Christian feeling ; and so doing, he might con- 
tinue in it so long as it would hold together. And so it was, 
no doubt, with all the other apostles. We have no evidence 
that before the destruction of the Jewish polity there was 
any attempt made by them to overthrow the Jewish external 
religion. They kept the Jewish sabbath, and observed the 
Jewish ritual. One of them, James, the Christian bishop of 
Jerusalem, though a Christian, Avas even among the Jews re- 
markable and honorable for the regularity with which he ob- 
served all his Jewish duties. Now let us apply this to 
modern duties. The great desire among men new appears to 
be to alter institutions, to have perfect institutionSj as ii tliejf 



Christian Casuistry, 545 

would make perfect men. Mark the difference between this 
feeling and that of the apostle, " Let every man abide in the 
same calling wherein he was called." We are called to be 
members of the Church of England — what is our duty now ? 
What would Paul have done ? Is this our duty — to put such 
questions to ourselves as these : " Is there any single, par- 
ticular sentence in the service of my Church with which I do 
not entirely agree ? Is there any single ceremony with 
which my whole soul does not go along ? If so, then is it my 
duty to leave it at once?" No, my brethren, all that we 
have to do is to say, "All our existing institutions are those 
under which God has placed us, under which we are to mould 
our lives according to His will." It is our duty to vitalize 
our forms, to throw into them a holier, deeper meaning. My 
Christian brethren, surely no man will get true rest, true re^ 
pose for his soul, in these days of controversy, until he has 
learned the wise significance of these wise words — " Let ev- 
ery man abide in the same calling wherein he was called." 
He will but gain unrest, he will but disquiet himself, if he 
says, " I am sinning by continuing in this imperfect system," 
if he considers it his duty to change his calling if his opinions 
do not agree in every particular and special point with the 
system under which God has placed him. 

Lastly, the apostle applies this principle civilly. And you 
will observe he applies it to that civil relationship which of 
all others was the most difficult to harmonize with Chris- 
tianity — slavery. " Art thou called," he says, " being a 
servant ? Care not for it." Now, in considering th;s part 
of the subject we should carry along with us these two rec- 
ollections. First, we should recollect that Christianity had 
made much way among this particular class, the class of 
slaves. No wonder that men cursed w^ith slavery embraced 
with joy a religion which was perpetually teaching the 
worth and dignity of the human soul, and declaring that 
rich and poor, peer and peasant, master and slave, were equal 
in the sight of God. And yet, great as this growth was, it 
contained within it elements of danger. It was to be feared 
lest men, hearing forever of brotherhood and Christian equal- 
ity, should be tempted and excited to throw off the yoke by 
force^ and compel their masters and oppressors to do them 
right. 

The other fact we are to keep in remembrance is this— 
that all this occurred in an age in which slavery had reach- 
ed its worst and most fearful form, an age in which the em- 
perors were accustomed, not unfrequently, to feed their fish 
with living slaves j when captives were led to fight in the 



546 Christian Casuistry, 

amphitheatre with wild beasts or with each other, to glut 
the Roman appetite for blood upon a Roman holiday. And 
yet, fearful as it was, the apostle says, " Care not for it." 
And fearful as war was in those days, when the soldiers 
came to John to be baptized, he did not recommend them to 
join some " peace association," to use the modern term ; he 
simply exhorted them to be content with their wages. 

And hence we understand the way in which Christianity 
was to work. It interferes indirectly and not directly with 
existing institutions. No doubt it will at length abolish 
war and slavery, but there is not one case where we find 
Christianity interfering with institutions, as such. Even 
when Onesimus ran away and came to Paul, the apostle sent 
him back to his master Philemon, not dissolving the connec- 
tion between them. And then, as a consolation to the serv- 
ant, he told him of a higher feeling — a feeling that would 
make him free, with the chain and shackle upon his arm. 
And so it was possible for the Christian then, as it is now, to 
be possessed of the highest liberty even under tyranny. It 
many times occurred that Christian men found themselves 
placed under an unjust and tyrannical government, and com- 
pelled to pay unjust taxes. The Son of Man showed his free- 
dom not by refusing, but by paying them. His glorious lib- 
erty could do so without any feeling of degradation ; obey- 
ing the laws, not because they were right, but because insti- 
tutions are to be upheld with cordiality. 

One thing in conclusion we have to observe. It is possi 
ble from all this to draw a most inaccurate conclusion. 
Some men have spoken of Christianity as if it was entirely 
indifferent about liberty and all public questions — as if with 
such things as these Christianity did not concern itself at 
all. This indifference is not to be found in the Apostle 
Paul. While he asserts that inward liberty is the only true 
liberty, he still goes on to say, " If thou mayest be free, use it 
rather." For he well knew that although it was possible for 
& man to be a high and lofty Christian even though he were 
a slave, yet it was not probable that he would be so. Out- 
ig-ard institutions are necessary partly to make a perfect 
Christian character ; and thus Christianity works from what 
is internal to what is external. It gave to the slave the feel- 
ing of his dignity as a man, at the same time it gave to the 
Christian master a new view of his relation to his slave, and 
taught him to regard him " not now as a servant, but above 
a servant, a brother beloved." And so by degrees slavery 
passed into freed servitude, and freed servitude, under God's 
blessing, may pass mto something else. 



Marriage and Celibacy, 547 

There are two mistakes which are often made upon this 
subject: one is, the error of supposing that outward institu- 
tions are unnecessary for the formation of character, and the 
other, that of supposing that they are all that is required to 
form the human soul. If we understand rightly the duty of 
a Christian man, it is this : to make his brethren free inward- 
ly and outwardly ; first inwardly, so that they may become 
masters of themselves, rulers of their passions, having the 
power of self-rule and self-control ; and then outwardly, so 
that there may be every power and opportunity of develop- 
ing the inward life ; in the language of the prophet, " To 
break the rod of the oppressor and let the oppressed go 
free." 



XIV. 
MARRIAGE AND CELIBACY. 

*'Bnt this I say, brethren, the time is short: it remaineth. that both they 
that have wives be as though they had none ; and they that weep, as though 
they wept not ; and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not ; and thej^ 
that buy, as though they possessed not ; and they that use this world, as not 
abusing it: for the fashion of this world passeth away." — 1 Cor. vii. 29-31. 

The subject of our exposition last Sunday was an essen- 
tial portion of this chapter. It is our duty to examine now 
the former and the latter portions of it. These portions are 
occupied entirely with the inspired apostolic decision upon 
this one question — the comparative advantages and merits 
of celibacy and marriage. One preliminary question, how- 
ever, is to be* discussed. How came it that «uch a question 
should be put at all to the apostle ? 

In the church at Corinth there were two different sections 
of society ; first there were those who had been introduced 
into the church through Judaism, and afterwards those who 
had been converted from different forms of heathenism. 
Now it is Avell known, that it was the tendency of Judaism 
highly to venerate the marriage state, and just in the same 
proportion to disparage that of celibacy, and to place those 
who led a single life under a stigma and disgrace. Those 
converts, therefore, entered into the Church of Christ carry- 
ing with them their old JeAvish prejudices. On the other 
hand, many who had entered mto the Christian Church had 
been converted to Christianity from different forms of hea- 
thenism. Among these prevailed a tendency to the belief 
(which originated primarily in the Oriental schools of philo& 



548 Marriage and Celibacy. 

ophy) that the highest virtue consisted in the denial of all 
natural inclinations, and the suppression of all natural de- 
sires ; and looking upon marriage on one side only, and that 
the lowest, they were tempted to consider it as low, earthly, 
carnal, and sensual. It was at this time that Christianity- 
entered into the world, and while it added fresh dignity and 
significance to the marriage relationship, it at the same time 
shed a splendor and a glory upon the other state. The vir- 
ginity of the mother of Our Lord — the solitary life of John 
the Baptist — the pure and solitary youth of Christ Himself 
— had thrown upon celibacy a meaning and dignity which it 
did not possess before. No marvel, therefore, that to men so 
educated, and but half prepared for Christianity, practices 
like these should have become exaggerations ; for it rarely 
happens that any right ideas can be given to the world 
without sufiering exaggeration. Human nature progresses, 
the human mind goes on ; but it is rarely in a straight line, 
almost always through the medium of reaction, rebounding 
from extremes which produce contrary extremes. So it was 
in the Church of Corinth. There were two opposite parties 
holding views diametrically opposed to one another — one 
honoring the married and depreciating the unmarried life — 
the other attributing peculiar dignity and sanctity to celi- 
bacy, and looking down with contempt upon the married 
Christian state. 

It is scarcely necessary to remind ourselves that this di- 
versity of sentiment has existed in the Church of Christ in 
almost all ages. For example, in the early ages, in almost 
all the writings of the Fathers we have exaggerated descrip- 
tions of the dignity and glory of the state of celibacy. They 
speak as if the marriage state was low, carnal, and worldly ; 
and the other the only one in which it is possible to attain 
to the higher spiritual life — the one the natural state, fit for 
man, the other the angelic, tit for angels. But ordinarily 
among men in general, in every age, the state of single life 
has been looked down upon and contemned. And then 
there comes to the parties who are so circumstanced a cer- 
tain sense of shame, and along with this a disposition to- 
wards calumny and slander. Let us endeavor to understand 
the wise, inspired decision which the Apostle Paul pro- 
nounced upon this subject. He does not decide, as we 
might have been led to suppose he would, from his own pe- 
culiarity of disposition, upon one side only ; but raises into 
relief the advantages and excellencies of both. He says that 
neither state has in itself any intrinsic merit — neither is in 
itself superior to the other. "I suppose, then," he says, *' thafi 



Marriage and Celibacy. 549 

this is good for the present distress. Art thou bound unto a 
wife ? Seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife ? 
Seek not a wife. But and if thou marry, thou hast not sin- 
ned : and if a virgin marry, she hath not sinned. Neverthe- 
less, such shall have trouble in the flesh : but I spare you." 
That is, I will spare you this trouble, in recommending a sin- 
gle, solitary life. You will observe that in these words he 
attributes no intrinsic merit or dignity to either celibacy or 
marriage. The comparative advantages of these two states 
he decides with reference to two considerations ; first of all 
with respect to their comparative power in raising the char- 
acter of the individual, and afterwards with reference to the 
opportunities which each respectively gires for the service 
of God. 

I. With respect to the single life, he tells us that he had 
his own proper gift from God ; in other words, he was one 
of those rare characters who have the power of living with- 
out personal sympathy. The feelings and affections of the 
Apostle Paul were of a strange and rare character — tending 
to expansiveness rather than concentration. Those sympa- 
thies which ordinary men expend upon a few, he extended 
to many. The members of the churches which he had found- 
ed at Corinth, and Ephesus, and Colosse, and Philippi, were 
to him as children ; and he threw upon them all that sym- 
pathy and affection which other men throw upon their own 
domestic circle. To a man so trained and educated, the sin- 
gle life gave opportunities of serving God which the marriage 
state could not give. St. Paul had risen at once to that phi- 
lanthropy — that expansive benevolence, which most other 
men only attain by slow degrees, and this was made, by 
God's blessing, a means of serving his cause. However we 
may sneer at the monastic system of the Church of Rome, it 
is unquestionable that many great works have been done by 
the monks which could not have been performed by men 
who had entered into the marriage relationship. Such ex- 
amples of heroic Christian effort as are seen in the lives of 
St. Bernard, of Francis Xavier, and many others, are scarcely 
ever to be found except in the single state. The forlorn 
hope in battle, as well as in the. cause of Christianity, must 
consist of men who have no domestic relationships to divide 
their devotion, who will leave no wife nor children to mourn 
over their loss. 

Let this great truth bring its improvement to those who, 
either of their own choice or by the force of circumstances, 
are destined hereafter to live a single life on earth ; and, in* 



55<^ Marriage and Celibacy, 

stead of yielding to that feeling so common among mankind 
— the feeling of envy at another's happiness ; instead of be- 
coming gloomy, and bitter, and censorious, let them remem- 
ber what the Bible has to tell of the deep significance of the 
Virgin Mary's life — let them reflect upon the snares and dif- 
ficulties from which they are saved — let them consider how 
much more time and money they can give to God — that they 
are called to the great work of serving causes, of entering 
into public questions, while others spend their time and tal- 
ents only upon themselves. The state of single life, however 
we may be tempted to think lightly of it, is a state that has 
peculiar opportunities of deep blessedness. 

On the other hand, the Apostle Paul brings forward, into 
strong relief, the blessedness and advantages of the marriage 
state. He tells us that it is a type of the union between the 
Redeemer and the Church. But as this belongs to another 
part of the subject, we shall not enter into it now. But we 
observe, that men in general must have their sympathies 
drawn put step by step, little by little. We do not rise to 
philanthropy all at once. We begin with personal, domestic, 
particular affections. And not only is it true that rarely can 
any man have the whole of his love drawn out except through 
this domestic state, but, also, it is to be borne in mind that 
those who have entered into this relationship have also their 
own peculiar advantages. It is true that in the marriage- 
life, interrupted as it is by daily cares and small trifles, those 
works of Christian usefulness can not be so continuously car- 
ried on as in the other. But is there not a deep meaning to 
be learned from the old expression — that celibacy is an an- 
gelic state ? that it is preternatural, and not natural ? that 
the goodness which is induced by it is not, so to speak, the 
natural goodness of humanity, but such a goodness as God 
scarcely intended ? 

Who of us can not recollect a period of his historj^ when 
all his time was devoted to the cause of Christ; when all 
his money was given to the service of God ; and when we 
were tempted to look down upon those who were less ardent 
than ourselves, as if they were not Christians? But now the 
difliculties of life have come upon us ; we have become in- 
volved in the trifles and the smallness of social domestic ex- 
istence ; and these have made us less devoted perhaps, less 
preternatural, less angelic — but more human, better fitted to 
enter into the daily cares and small difficulties of our ordi- 
nary humanity. And this has been represented tons by two 
great lives — one human, the other Divine — one, the life of 
John the Baptist, and the other, of Jesus Christ. In both 



Marriage and Celibacy, 551 

these cases is verified the saying, that "Wisdom is justified 
of all her children." Those who are wisdom's children — the 
truly wise — will recognize an even wisdom in both these 
lives ; they will see that there are cases in which a solitary 
life is to be chosen for the sake of God ; while there are 
other cases in which a social life becomes our bounden duty. 
But it should be specially observed here that that life 
which has been given to us as a specimen of life for all, was 
a social, a human life. Christ did not refuse to mix with the 
common joys and common sorrows of humanity. He was 
present at the marriage-feast, and by the bier of the widow's 
son. This, of the two lives, was the one which, because it was 
the most human, was the most Divine ; the most rare, the 
most difficult, the most natural — therefore the most Christ- 
Uke. 

n. Let us notice, in the second place, the principle upon 
which the apostle founds this decision. It is given in the 
text — " This I say, brethren, the time is short : it remaineth 
that both they that have wives be as though they had none," 
"for the fashion of this world passeth away." Now observe 
here, I pray you, the deep wisdom of this apostolic decision. 
In point of fact it comes to this : Christianity is a spirit, 
not a law ; it is a set of principles, not a set of rules ; it is 
not a saying to us. You shall do this, you shall not do that ; 
you shall use this particular dress, you shall not use that ; 
you shall lead, you shall not lead a married life. Christianity 
consists of principles, but the application of those principles 
is left to every man's individual conscience. With respect 
not only to this particular case, but to all the questions 
which had been brought before him, the apostle applies the 
same principle; the cases upon which he decided were many 
and various, but the large, broad principle of his decision re- 
mains the same in all. You may marry, and you have not 
sinned ; you may remain unmarried, and you do not sin ; 
if you are invited to a heathen feast, you may go, or you 
may abstain from going ; you may remain a slave, or you 
may become free; in these things Christianity does not con- 
sist. But what it does demand is this : that whether mar- 
ried or unmarried, whether a slave or free, in sorrow or in 
joy, you are to live in a spirit higher and loftier than that 
of the world. 

The apostle gives us in the text two motives for this 
Christian unworldliness. The first motive which he lays 
down is this — "The time is short." You will observe how 
frequently, in the course of his remarks upon the questions 



552 Marriage and Celibacy. 

proposed to him, the apostle turns, as it were, entirely away 
from the subject, as if worn out and wearied by the com- 
paratively trivial character of the questions -r- as if this 
balancing of one earthly condition or advantage with an- 
other were but a solemn trifling compared with eternal 
things. And so here he seems to turn away from the ques- 
tion before him, and speaks of the shortness of time — " The 
time is short !" 

Time is short in reference to two things. First, it is short 
in reference to the person who regards it. That mysterious 
thing time^ is a matter of sensation, and not a reality ; a 
modification merely of our own consciousness, and not actual 
existence ; depending upon the flight of ideas — long to one, 
short to another. The span granted to the butterfly, the 
child of a single summer, may be long ; that which is given 
to the cedar of Lebanon may be short. The shortness of 
time, therefore, is entirely relative — belonging to us not to 
God. Time is short in reference to existence^ whether you 
look at it before or after. Time past seems nothing ; time 
to come always seems long. We say this chiefly for the 
sake of the young. To them fifty or sixty years seems a 
treasure inexhaustible. But, my young brethren, ask the 
old man, trembling on the verge of the grave, what he 
thinks of time and life. He will tell you that the three- 
score years and ten, or even the hundred and twenty years 
of Jacob, are but "few and evil." And therefore if you are 
tempted to unbelief in respect to this question, we appeal to 
experience — experience alone can judge of its truth. 

Once more : time is short with reference to its opportimi- 
ties. For this is the emphatic meaning in the original — 
literally, " The opportunity is compressed, or shut in." 
Brethren, time may be long, and yet the opportunity may 
be very short. The sun in autumn may be bright and clear, 
but the seed which has not been sown until then will not 
vegetate. A man may have vigor and energy in manhood 
and maturity, but the work which ought to have been done 
in childhood and youth can not be done in old age. A chance 
once gone in this world can never be recovered. 

Brother men, have you learned the meaning of yesterday? 
Do you rightly estimate the importance of to-day? That 
there are duties to be done to-day which can not be done 
to-morrow? This it is that throws so solemn a significance 
into your work. The time for working is short, therefore 
begin to-day ; " for the night is coming when no man can 
work." Time is short in reference to eternity. It was es- 
pecially with this reference that the text was written. Id 



Marriage and Celibacy. 553 

those days, and even by the apostles themselves, the day 
of the Lord's appearance and second advent seemed much 
nearer than it was. They believed that it would occur 
during their own lives. And with this belief came the 
feeling which comes sometimes to all. " Oh, in comparison 
with that vast hereafter, this little life shrivels into nothing ! 
What is to-day worth, or its duties or its cares ?" All deep 
minds have thought that. The thought of Time is solemn 
and awful to all minds in proportion to their depth — and 
in proportion as the mind is superficial, the thought has 
appeared little, and has been treated with levity. Brethren, 
let but a man possess himself of that thought — the deep 
thought of the brevity of time ; this thought — that time is 
short, and that eternity is long — and he has learned the first 
great secret of unworldliness. 

The second motive which the apostle gives us is the 
chansjingr character of the external world. "The fashion of 
this world passeth away " — literally, " the scenery of this 
world," a dramatic expression, drawn from the Grecian stage. 
One of the deepest of modern thinkers has told us in words 
often quoted, "All the world's a stage." And a deeper 
thinker than he, because inspired, had said long before in 
the similar words of the text, " The scenery of this world 
passeth away." 

There are two ways in which this is true. First, it is true 
with respect to all the things by which we are surrounded. 
It is only in poetry — the poetry of the Psalms for example 
• — that the hills are called " everlasting." Go to the side of 
the ocean which bounds our country, and watch the tide 
going out, bearing with it the sand which it has worn from 
the cliffs; the very boundaries of our lana are changing; 
they are not the same as they were when these words were 
written. Every day new relationships are forming around 
us; new circumstances are calling upon us to act — to act 
manfully, firmly, decisively, and up to the occasion, remem- 
bering that an opportunity once gone is gone forever. In- 
dulge not in vain regrets for the past, in vainer resolves for 
the future — act, act in the present. 

Again, this is true with respect to ourselves. " The 
fashion of this world passeth away " in us. The feelings we 
have now are not those which we had in childhood. There 
has passed away a glory from the earth — the stars, the sun, 
ihe moon, the green fields have lost their beauty and signifi- 
cance — nothing remains as it was, except their repeated 
impressions on the mind, the impressions of time, space, 
eternity,, color, form ; these can not alter, but all besides has 



554 Marriage a^id Celibacy. 

changed. Our very minds alter. There is no bereavement 
so painful, no shock so terrible, but time will remove or 
alleviate. The keenest feeling in this world time wears out 
at last, and our minds become like old monumental tablet^i 
which have lost the inscription once graven deeply upon 
them. 

In conclusion, we have to examine the nature of this 
Christian unworldliness which is taught us in the text. The 
principle of unworldliness is stated in the latter portion of 
the text ; in the former part the apostle makes an applica- 
tion of the principle to four cases of life. First, to cases of 
domestic relationship — "it remaineth that they that have 
wives be as though they had none." Secondly, to cases of 
sorrow — "and they that weep as though they wept not." 
Thirdly, to cases of joy — "and they that rejoice as though 
they rejoiced not." And, finally, to cases of the acquisition 
of worldly property — " and they that buy as though they 
possessed not." Time will not allow us to go into these 
applications ; we must confine ourselves to a brief considera- 
tion of the principle. The principle of Christian unworldli- 
ness, then, is this, to " use this world as not abusing it." 
Here Christianity takes its stand in opposition to two con- 
trary principles. The spirit of the world says, " Time is 
short, therefore use it while you have it ; take your fill of 
pleasure while you may." A narrow religion says, "Time is 
short, therefore temporal things should receive no attention : 
do not weep, do not rejoice; it is beneath a Christian." In 
opposition to the narrow^ spirit of religion, Christianity says, 
" Use this world ;" — in opposition to the spirit of the world 
Christianity says, " Do not ahiise it." A distinct duty arises 
from this principle to use the world. While in the world 
we are citizens of the w^orld : it is our duty to share its joys, 
to take our part in its sorrows, not to shrink from its difiS- 
culties, but' to mix ourselves with its infinite opportunities. 
So that if time be short, so far from that fact lessening their 
dignity or importance, it infinitely increases them ; since 
upon these depend the destinies of our eternal being. Un- 
worldliness is this — to hold things from God in the per- 
petual conviction that they will not last ; to have the world, 
and not to let the world have us ; to be the world's masters, 
and not the world's slaves. 



The Christian Church a Family, 555 



XV. 
THE CHRISTIAN' CHURCH A FAMILY. 

** Our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is 
named." — Eph. iii. 14, 15. 

In the verses immediately before the text the Apostle 
Paul has been speaking of what he calls a mystery — that 
is, a revealed secret. And the secret was this, that the 
Gentiles would be " fellows-heirs and of the same body, and 
partakers of the promise in Christ by the Gospel." It had 
been kept secret from the former ages and generations ; it 
was a secret which the Jew had not suspected, had not even 
dreamt of. It appeared to him to be his duty to keep as far 
as possible from the Gentile. Circumcision, which taught 
him the duty of separation from the Gentile spirit and Gentile 
practices, seemed to him to teach hatred towards Gentile 
persons^ until at length, in the good pleasure and providence 
of God, in the fullness of time, through the instrumentality 
of men w^hose Tiearts rather than whose intellects were in- 
spired by God, the truth came out distinct and clear, that God 
was the Father of the Gentiles as well as of the Jews, " for 
the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon Him." 

In the progress of the months, my Christian brethren, we 
have arrived again at that period of the year in which our 
Church calls upon us to commemorate the Epiphany, or 
manifestation of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, and w^e know 
not that in the whole range of Scripture we could find a 
passage which more distinctly and definitely than this brings 
before us the spirit in which it is incumbent upon us to enter 
upon this duty, In considering this passage we shall divide 
it into these two branches : 

I. The definition which the Apostle Paul here gives of 
the Church of Christ ; and, 

n. The name by which this Church is named. 

I. In the first place, let us consider the definition given by 
the Apostle Paul of the Christian Church, taken in its en- 
tirety. It is this, " the whole family in heaven and earth." 
But in order to understand this fully, it wdll be necessary for 
us to break it up into its different terms. 

1. First of all, it is taught by this definition that the 



55^ The Chris tiajt Church a Family, 

Church of Christ is a society founded upon natural affinities 
• — a " family." A family is built on affinities which are nat- 
ural, not artificial ; it is not a combination, but a society. 
In ancient times an association of interest combined men in 
one guild or corporation for protecting the common persons in 
that corporation from oppression. In modern times identity 
of political creed or opinion has bound men together in one 
league, in order to establish those political principles which 
appeared to them of importance. Similarity of taste has 
united men together in what is called an association, or a 
society, in order by this means to attain more completely 
the ends of that science to which they had devoted them- 
selves. But as these have been raised artificially, so their 
end is, inevitably, dissc^lution. Society passes on, and guilds 
and corporations die ; principles are established, and leagues 
become dissolved ; tas^tes change, and then the association or 
society breaks up and comes to nothing. 

It is upon another principle altogether that that which we 
call a family, or true society, is formed. It is not built upon 
similarity of taste, ncr identity of opinion, but upon affini- 
ties of nature. You do .not choose who shall be your broth- 
er; you can not exclude your mother or your sister ; it does 
not depend upon choice or arbitrary opinion at all, but is 
founded upon the eternal nature of things. And precisely 
in the same way is the Christian Church formed — upon nat- 
ural affinity, and not upon artificial combination. " The 
family, the whole family m heaven and earth ;" not made up 
of those who call themselves brethren, but of those who are 
brethren ; not founded merely upon the principles of com- 
bination, but upon the principles of affinity. That is not a 
church, or a family, or a society which is made up by men's 
choice, as when, in the upper classes of life, men of fashion 
unite together, selecting their associates from their own clasSy 
and form what is technically called a society ; it is a com- 
bination, if you will, but a society it is not — a family it is 
not — a Church of Christ it can not be. 

And, again, when the Baptists or the Independents, or any 
other sectarians, unite themselves with men holding the same 
faith and entertaining the same opinions, there may be a sect^ 
a combination^ a persuasion^ but a Clmrch there can not be. 
And so, again, when the Jew in time past linked himself with 
the Jew, with those of the same nation, th^re you have what 
in ancient times was called Judaism, and in modern times 
is called Hebraicism — a system, a combination, but not a 
Church. The Church rises ever out of the family. First of 
allj in the good providence of God, there is the family- then 



The Christiari Church a Family. 557 

the tribe, then the nation ; and then the nation merges itself 
into humanity. And the nation which refuses to merge its 
nationality in humanity, to lose itself in the general interests 
of mankind, is left behind, and loses almost its religious na- 
tionality — like the Jewish people. 

Such is the first principle. A man is born of the same 
family, and is not made such by an appointment or by arbi- 
trary choice. 

2. Another thing which is taught by this definition is this, 
that the Church of Christ is a whole made up of manifold di- 
versities. We are told here it is " the whole family," taking 
into it the great and good of ages past, now in heaven ; and 
also the struggling, the humble, and the weak now existing 
upon earth. Here, again, the analogy holds good between 
the Church and the family. Never more than in the family 
is the true entirety of our nature seen. Observe how all the 
diversities of human condition and character manifest them- 
selves in the family. 

First of all, there are the two opposite poles of masculine 
and feminine, which contain within them the entire of our 
humanity — which together, not separately, make up the 
whole of man. Then there are the diversities in the degrees 
and kinds of afiection. For when we speak of family affec- 
tion we must remember that it is made up of many diversi- 
ties. There is nothing more different than the love which 
the sister bears towards the brother, compared with that 
which the brother bears towards the sister. The affection 
which a man bears towards his father is quite distinct from 
that which he feels towards his mother ; it is something 
quite different towards his sister ; totally diverse again, to- 
wards his brother. 

And then there are diversities of character. First the ma- 
ture wisdom and stern integrity of the father ; then the ex- 
uberant tenderness of the mother. And then one is brave 
and enthusiastic, another thoughtful, and another tender. 
One is remarkable for being full of rich humor, another is 
sad, mournful, even melancholy. Again, besides these, there 
are diversities of condition in life. First, there is the heir, 
sustaining the name and honor of the family ; then perchance 
the soldier, in whose career all the anxiety and solicitude of 
the family is centred ; then the man of business, to whom 
they look up, trusting his advice, expecting his counsel ; 
lastly, perhaps, there is the invalid, from the very cradle 
trembling between life and death, drawing out all the sym- 
pathies and anxieties of each member of the family, and so 
uniting them all more closely, from their having one common 



558 The Christian Church a Family. 

point of sympathy and solicitude. Now, you will observe 
tlmt these are not accidental, but absolutely essential to the 
idea of a family ; for so far as any one of them is lost, so far 
the family is incomplete. A family made up of one sex 
alone, all brothers and no sisters ; or in which all are devo- 
ted to one pursuit ; or in which there is no diversity of tem- 
per and dispositions — the same monotonous repeated identity 
■ — a sameness in the type of character— this is not a family, 
it is only the fragment of a family. 

And precisely in the same way all these diversities of 
character and condition are necessary to constitute and com- 
plete the idea of a Christian Church. For as in ages past it 
was the delight of the Church to canonize one particular 
class of virtues — as for instance, purity or martyrdom — so 
now, in every age, and in every individual bosom, there is a 
tendency to canonize, or honor, or reckon as Christian, only 
one or two classes of Christian qualities. For example, if 
you were to ask in the present day where you should find a 
type of the Christian character, many in all probability 
would point you to the man who keeps the sabbath-day, is 
regular in his attendance upon the services of the Church, 
who loves to hear the Christian sermon. This is a phase of 
Christian character — that which is essentially and peculiarly 
the femi7ii7ie type of religion. But is there in God's Church 
to be found no place for that type which is rather masculine 
than feminine? — which not in litanies or in psalm-singing 
does the Avill of God, but by struggling for principles, and 
contending for the truth — that life whose prayer is action, 
whose aspiration is continual effort ? 

Or again, in every age, amongst all men, in the history of 
almost every individual, at one time or another, there has 
been a tendency towards that which has been emphatically 
named in modern times hero-worsliip — leading us to an ad- 
miration of the more singular, powerful, noble qualities of 
humanity. And wherever this tendency to hero-worship ex- 
ists, there will be found side by side with it a tendency to 
undervalue and depreciate excellences of an opposite charac- 
ter — the humble, meek, retiring qualities. But it is precisely 
for these that the Church of Christ finds place. " Blessed 
are the meek, blessed are the merciful, blessed are they that 
hunger and thirst after righteousness, blessed are the poor in 
spirit." In God's world there is a place for the wren and the 
violet, just as truly as there is for the eagle and the rose. 
In the Church of God there is a place — and that the noblest 
' — for Dorcas making garments for the poor, and for Mary 
Bitting at the feet of Jesus, just as truly as there is for Elijah 



The Christian Church a Family, 559 

confounding a false religion by his noble opposition, for 
John the Baptist making a king tremble on his throne, or 
for the Apostle Paul " compassing sea ana land " by his 
wisdom and his heroic deeds. 

Once more, there are ages as well as times in our own in- 
dividual experience, when we set up charity as if it were the 
one only Christian character. And wherever this tendency 
is found there will be found at the same time, and side by 
side with it, a tendency to admire the spurious form of char- 
ity, which is a sentiment and not a virtue ; which can sym- 
pathize with crime, but not with law ; which can be tender 
to savages, but has no respect, no care for national honor. 
And therefore does this principle of the Apostle Paul call 
upon us to esteem also another form or type of character, and 
the opposite one ; that which is remarkable for^n which pre- 
dominates — not so much charity sls justice / that which was 
iseen in the warriors and prophets of old ; who, perchance, 
iiad a more strong recoil from vice than sympathy with vir- 
tue ; whose indignation towards that which is wrong and 
hypocritical was more intense than their love for that which 
is good : the material, the character, out of which the re- 
former and the prophet, those who are called to do great 
works on earth, are made. 

The Church of Christ takes not in one individual form of 
goodness merely, but every form of excellence that can 
adorn humanity. Nor is this wonderful when we remem- 
ber who He was from whom this Church was named. It 
was He in whom centred all excellence — a righteousness 
which was entire and perfect. But when we speak of the 
perfection of righteousness, let us remember that it is made 
not of one exaggerated character, but of a true harmony, 
a due proportion of all virtues united. In Him were found, 
therefore, that tenderness towards sinners which had no 
sympathy with sin ; that humility which could be dignified, 
and was yet united with self-respect ; that simplicity which 
is ever to be met with side by side with true majesty; that 
love which could weep over Jerusalem at the very moment 
when He was pronouncing its doom ; that truth and justice 
which appeared to stand as a protection to those who had 
been oppressed, at the same time that He scathed with in- 
dignant invective the Pharisees of the then existing Jews. 

There are two, only two perfect humanities. One has ex- 
isted already in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, the 
other is to be found only in the collective Church. Once, 
only once, has God given a perfect representation of Himself, 
" the brightness of the Father's glory, and the express image 



560 The Christian Church a Family, 

of His person." And if we ask again for a perfect humauiiy, 
the answer is, it is not in this Church or in that Church, ol 
in this man or in that man, in this age or in that age, bu< in 
the collective blended graces, and beauties, and humanicies, 
which are found in every age, in all churches, but not in overy 
separate man. So, at least, Paul has taught us, " Till we all 
come " — collectively, not separately — " in the unity of the 
faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect 
man" — in other words, to a perfect hmnanity — "unto the 
measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." 

3. The last thing which is taught us by this definition is, 
that the Church of Christ is a society which is forever shifting 
its locality and altering its forms. It is the whole church j 
" the whole family in heaven and earth." So, then, those who 
were on earth, and are now in heaven, are yet members of 
the same family still. Those who had their home here, now 
have it there. 

Let us see what it is that we should learn from this doctrine. 
It is this, that the dead are not lost to us. There is a sense 
in which the departed are ours more than they were before. 
There is a sense in which the Apostles Paul or John, the good 
and great of ages past, belong to this age more than to that in 
which they lived, but in which they were not understood ; in 
which the commonplace and every-day part of their lives hin- 
dered the brightness and glory and beauty of their character 
from shining forth. So it is in the familyc It is possible for 
men to live in the same house, and partake of the same meal 
from day to day, and from year to year, and yet remain stran- 
gers to each other, mistaking each other's feelings, not com- 
prehending each other's character; and it is only when the 
Atlantic rolls between, and half a hemisphere is interposed, 
that we learn how dear they are to us, how all our life is 
bound up in deep anxiety with their existence. Therefore it 
is the Christian feels that the family is not broken. Think 
you that family can break or end ? — that because the chair 
is empty, therefore he, your child, is no more ? It may be so 
with the coarse, the selfish, the unbelieving, the superstitious ; 
but the eye of faith sees there only a transformation. He is 
not there, he is risen. You see the place where he was, but 
he has passed to heaven. So at least the parental heart of 
David felt of old, " by faith and not by sight," when speak- 
ing of his infant child. " I shall go to him, but he shall not 
return to me." 

Once more, the Church of Christ is a society ever altering 
and changing its external forms. " The lohole family " — the 
Church of the patriarchs, and of ages before them ; and yet 



The Christian Church a Family, 561 

the same family. Remember, I pray you, the diversities of 
form through which, in so many ages and generations, thia 
Church has passed. Consider the difference there was be- 
tween the patriarchal Church of the time of Abraham and 
Isaac, and its condition under David ; or the difference be- 
tween the Church so existing and its state in the days of the 
apostles ; and the marvellous difference between that and the 
same Church four or five centuries later ; or, once again, the 
difference between that, externally one, and the Church as it 
exists in the present day, broken into so many fragments. 
Yet diversified as these states may be, they are not more so 
than the various stages of a family. 

Tiiere is a time when the children are all in. one room, 
around their mother's knee. Then comes a time, still farther 
on^ when the first separation takes place, and some are leav- 
ing their liome to prepare for after-life. Afterwards, when 
all in their different professions, trades or occupations, are 
separate^ At last comes the time when some are s^one. And, 
perchance, the two survivors meet at last — an old, gray-hair- 
ed man, and a weak, worn-out woman — to mourn over the 
last graves of a household. Christian brethren, which of 
these is the right form — the true, external pattern of a fam- 
ily ? Say we not truly, it remains the same under all out- 
ward mutations ? We must think of this, or else we may lose 
heart in our work. Conceive, for instance, the feelings of a 
pious Jew, when Christianity entered this world ; when all his 
religious system was broken up — the Temple-service brought 
to a violent end ; when that polity which he thought was to 
redeem and ennoble the world was cast aside as a broken 
and useless thing. Must they not have been as gloomy and 
as dreary as those of the disciples, when He was dead who 
they " trusted should have redeemed Israel ?" In both cases 
the body was gone or was altered — the spirit had arisen. 

And precisely so it is with our fears and unbelieving ap- 
prehensions now. Institutions pass — churches alter — old 
forms change — and high-minded and good men cling to 
these as if they were the only things by which God could 
regenerate the world, Christianity appears to some men to 
be effete and worn out. Men who can look back upon the 
times of Venn, and Newton, and Scott — comparing the de- 
generacy of their descendants with the men of those days — 
lose heart as if all things were going wrong. " Things are 
not," they say, "as they were in our younger days." No, 
my Christian brethren, things are not as they then were ; 
but the Christian cause lives on — not in the successors of 
Buch men as those j the outward form is altered, but th« 



562 The Christian Church a Family . 

spirit is elsewhere, is risen — risen just as truly as the spirit 
of the highest Judaism rose again in Christianity. And to 
mourn over old superstitions and effete creeds is just as un- 
wise as is the grief of the mother mourning over the form 
which was once her child. She can not separate her affec- 
tion from that form — those hands, those limbs, those features 
—are they not her child ? The true answer is, her child is 
aot there. It is only the form of her child. And it is as un- 
wise to mourn over the decay of those institutions — the 
change of human forms — as it was unwise in Jonah to mourn 
with that passionate sorrow over the decay of the gourd 
which had sheltered him from the heat of the noontide sun. 
A worm had eaten the root of the gourd, and it w^as gone. 
But He who made the gourd the shelter to the Aveary — the 
shadow of those who are oppressed by the noontide heat of 
life — lived on : Jonah's God. And so, brethren, all things 
change — all things outward change and alter; but the God 
of the Church lives on. The Church of God remains un- 
der fresh forms — the one, holy, entire family in heaven and 
earth. 

II. Pass we on now, in the second place, to consider the 
name by which this Church is named. " Our Lord Jesus 
Christ," the Apostle says, "of whom the whole family in 
heaven and earth is named." 

Now, every one familiar with the Jewish modes of thought 
and expression will allow here that name is but another 
word to express being, actuality, and existence. So when 
Jacob desired to know the character and nature of Jehovah, 
he said — "Tell me now, I beseech thee, thy nmneP When 
the Apostle here says, " Our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the 
whole family in heaven and earth is named^^ it is but anoth- 
er way of saying that it is He on whom the Church depends 
— who has given it substantive existence — without whom it 
could not be at all. It is but another w^ay of saying what he 
has expressed elsewhere — " that there is none other name 
under heaven given among men, whereby we may be saved." 
Let us not lose ourselves in vague generalities. Separate 
from Christ, there is no salvation ; there can be no Christian- 
ity. Let us understand what we mean by this. Let us 
clearly define and enter into the meaning of the words we 
use. When we say that our Lord Jesus Christ is He " ol 
w^hom the whole family in heaven and earth is named," we 
mean that the very being of the Church depends on Christ — 
that it could not be without Him. Now, the Church of 
Christ depends upon these three things — first, the recognition 



The Christian Church a Family. 563 

of a common Father; secondly, of a common humanity ; and 
thirdly, of a common sacrifice. 

1. First, the recognition of a common Father. That is the 
sacred truth proclaimed by the Epiphany. God revealed in 
Christ — not the Father of the Jew only, but also of the 
Gentile. The Father of a " whole family." Not the partial 
Father loving one alone — the elder — but the younger son 
besides : the outcast prodigal who had spent his living with 
harlots and sinners, but the child still, and the child of a 
Father's love. Our Lord taught this in His own blessed 
prayer — " Our Father ;" and as we lose the meaning of 
that single word ou)\ as we say my Father — the Father of 
ine and of imy faction — of me and my fellow-believers — m,y 
Anglicanism or m,y Judaism- -be it what it may — instead of 
our Father — the Father of the outcasts, the profligate, of all 
who choose to claim a Father's love ; so we lose the meaning 
of the lesson which the Epiphany was designed to teach, and 
the possibility of building up a family to God. 

2. The recognition of a common humanity. He from 
whom the Church is named, took upon Him not the nature 
merely of the noble, of kings, or of the intellectual philoso- 
pher — but of the beggar, the slave, the outcast, the infidel, 
the sinner, and the nature of every one struggling in various 
ways. Let us learn then, brother men, that we shall have no 
family in God, unless we learn the deep truth of our common 
humanity, shared in by the servant and the sinner, as well as 
the sovereign. Without this we shall have no Church — no 
family in God. 

3. Lastly, the Church of Christ proceeds out of, and rests 
upon, the belief in a common sacrifice. 

There are three ways in which the human race hitherto 
has endeavored to construct itself into a family ; first, by 
the sword ; secondly, by an ecclesiastical system ; and third- 
ly, by trade or commerce. First, by the sword. The Assyri- 
an, the Persian, the Greek, and the Roman, have done their 
work — in itself a most valuable and important one ; but so 
far as the formation of mankind into a family was the object 
aimed at, the work of the sword has done almost nothing. 
Then there was the ecclesiastical system — the grand attempt 
of the Church of Rome to organize all men into one family, 
with an ecclesiastical, visible, earthly head. Being Protest- 
ants, it is not necessary for us to state our conviction that 
this attempt has been a signal and complete failure. We 
now come to the system of commerce and trade. We are 
told that that which chivalry and honor could not do — which 



564 The Christian Church a Family, 

an ecclesiastical system could not do — personal interest witi 
do. Trade is to bind men together into one family. When 
they feel it their interest to be one, they will be brothers. 
Brethren, that which is built on selfishness can not stand. 
The system of personal interest must be shivered into atoms. 
Therefore, we, who have observed the ways of God in the 
past, are waiting in quiet but awful expectation until He 
shall confound this system as He has confounded those which 
have gone before. And it may be effected by convulsions 
more terrible and more bloody than the world has yet seen. 
While men are talking of peace, and of the great progress of 
civilization, there is heard in the distance the noise of armies 
gathering rank on rank : east and west, north and south, 
are rolling towards us the crushing thunders of universal 
war. 

Therefore there is but one other system to be tried, and 
that is the cross of Christ — a system that is not to be built 
upon selfishness, nor upon blood, nor upon personal interest, 
but upon love. Love, not self — the cross of Christ, and not 
the mere working out of the ideas of individual humanity. 

One word only, in conclusion. Upon this, the great truth 
of the Epiphany, the apostle founds a prayer. He prays, 
" For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth 
is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches 
of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit 
in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts by 
faith." This manifestation of joy and good to the Gentiles 
was, according to him, the great mystery of love. A love, 
brighter, deeper, wider, higher than the largest human heart 
had ever yet dreamed of But the apostle tells us it is, after 
all, but a glimpse of the love of God. How should we learn 
it more ? How should we comprehend the whole meaning 
of the Epiphany ? By sitting down to read works of theolo- 
gy ? The Apostle Paul tells us — No. You must love, in 
order to understand love. " That ye, being rooted and 
grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all sainte 
what is the breadth and length, and depth and height ; and 
to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge." 
Brother men, one act of charity will teach us more of the 
love of God than a thousand sermons — one act of unselfish- 
ness, of real self-denial, the putting forth of one loving feeling 
to the outcast and " those who are out of the way," will tell 
us more of the meaning of the Epiphany than whole volumes 
of the wisest writers on theology. 



The Law of Christian Conscience, 55^ 



XVI. 
THE LAW OF CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE. 

"Howbeit there is not in every man that knowledge : for some with con- 
science of the idol unto this hour eat it as a thing offered unto an idol ; and 
their conscience being weak is defiled. But meat commendeth us not to 
God : for neither, if we eat, are we the better ; neither, if we eat not, are we 
the worse. But take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a 
stumblingblock to them that are weak. For if any man see thee which hast 
knowledge sit at meat in the idol's temple, shall not the conscience of him 
which is weak be emboldened to eat those things which are offered to idols ; 
and through thy knowledge shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ 
died ? But when ye sin so against the brethren, and wound their weak 
conscience, ye sin against Chi'ist. Wherefore, if meat make my brother to 
offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother 
to offend."— 1 Cor. viii. 7-13. 

We have already divided this chapter into two branches 
— the former portion of it containing the difference between 
Christian knowledge and secular knowledge, and the second 
portion containing the apostolic exposition of the law of 
Christian conscience. The first of these we endeavored to 
expound last Sunday, but it may be well briefly to recapitu- 
late the principles of that discourse in a somewhat diflferent 
form. 

Corinth, as w^e all know and remember, was a city built 
on the sea-coast, having a large and free communication with 
all foreign nations ; and there was also within it, and going 
on amongst its inhabitants, *a free interchange of thought, 
and a vivid power of communicating the philosophy and 
truths of those days to each other. Now it is plain, that to 
a society in such a state, and to minds so educated, the Gos- 
pel of Christ must have presented a peculiar attraction, pre- 
senting itself to them, as it did, as a law of Christian liberty. 
And so in Corinth the Gospel had "free course and was 
glorified," and was received with great joy by almost all 
men, and by minds of all classes and all sects ; and a large 
number of these attached themselves to the teaching of the 
Apostle Paul as the most accredited expounder of Christiani- 
ty — the " royal law of liberty." But it seems, from what 
we read in this epistle, that a large number of these men re- 
ceived Christianity as a thing intellectual, and that alone — ■ 
and not as a thing which touched the conscience^ and swayed 
and purified the atfections. Thus this liberty became to 



566 The Law of Christian Conscience, 

them almost all — they ran into sin or went to extravagance 
— they rejoiced in their freedom from the superstitions, the 
ignorances, and the scruples which bound their weaker 
brethren ; but had no charity — none of that intense charity 
which characterized the Apostle Paul, for those still strug- 
gling in the delusions and darkness from which they them- 
selves were free. 

More than that, they demanded their right, their Christian 
liberty, of expressing their opinions in the church, merely for 
the sake of exhibiting the Christian graces and spiritual gifts 
which had been showered upon them so largely; until by 
degrees those very assemblies became a lamentable exhibi- 
tion of their own depravity, and led to numerous irregulari- 
ties which we find severely rebuked by the Apostle Paul. 
Their women, rejoicing in the emancipation which had been 
given to the Christian community, laid aside the old habits 
of attire which had been consecrated so long by Grecian and 
Jewish custom, and appeared with their heads uncovered in 
the Christian community. Still further than that, the Lord's 
Supper exhibited an absence of all solemnity, and seemed 
more a meeting for licentious gratification, where " one was 
hungry, and another was drunken " — a place in which earth- 
ly drunkenness, the mere enjoyment of the appetites, had tak- 
en the place of Christian charity towards each other. 

And the same feeling — this love of mere liberty — liberty 
in itself — manifested itself in many other directions. Hold- 
ing by this freedom, their philosophy taught that the body, 
that is, the flesh, was the only cause of sin ; that the soul was 
holy and pure ; and that therefore, to be free from the body 
would be entire, perfect. Christian emancipation. And so 
came in that strange, wrong doctrine, exhibited in Corinth, 
where immortality was taught separate from, and in opposi- 
tion to, the doctrine of the resurrection. And afterwards 
they went on with their conclusions about liberty, to main- 
tain that the body, justified by the sacrifice of Christ, was no 
longer capable of sin ; and that in the evil which was done 
by the body the soul had taken no part. And therefore sin 
was to them but as a name, from which a Christian conscience 
was to be freed altogether. So that when one of their num- 
ber had fallen into grievous sin, and had committed fornica- 
tion, " such as was not so much as named among the Gen- 
tiles," so far from being humbled by it, they were " pufied 
up," as if they were exhibiting to the world an enlightened, 
true, perfect Christianity — separate from all prejudices. 

To such a. society and to such a state of mind the Apostle 
Paul x^reached, in all its lengtli, breadth, and fullness, the 



The Law of Christian Conscience, 567 

humbling doctrines of the cross of Christ. He taught that 
knowledge was one thing — that charity was another thing; 
that " knowledge puffeth up, but charity buildeth up." He 
reminded them that love was the perfection of knowledge. 
In other words, his teaching came to this : there are two 
kinds of knowledge; the one the knowledge of the intellect, 
the other the knowledge of the heart. Intellectually, God 
never can be known. He must be known by love — for, "if 
any man love God, the same is known of Him." Here, then, 
we have arrived in another way at precisely the same con- 
clusion at which we arrived last Sunday. Here are two 
kinds of knowledge, secular knowledge and Christian knowl 
edge ; and Christian knowledge is this — to know by love. 

Let us now consider the remainder of the chapter, which 
treats of the law of Christian conscience. You will observe 
that it divides itself into two branches — the first containing 
an exposition of the law itself, and the second the Christian 
applications which flow out of this exposition, 

I. The way in which the apostle expounds the law of 
Christian conscience is this: — Guilt is contracted by -the 
soul, in so far as it sins against and transgresses the law of 
God by doing that which it believes to be wrong: not so 
much what is wrong as what appears to it to be wrong. 
This is the doctrine distinctly laid down in the seventh and 
eighth verses. The apostle tells the Corinthians — these 
strong-minded Corinthians — that the superstitions of their 
weaker brethren were unquestionably wrong„ " Meat," he 
says, "commendeth us not to God ; for neither if we eat are 
we the better, neither if we eat not are we the worse.'" He 
then tells them further, that " there is not in every man that 
knowledge ; for some, with conscience of the idol, eat it as a 
thing offered unto an idol." Here, then, is an ignorant, mis- 
taken, ill-formed conscience ; and yet he goes on to tell them 
that this conscience, so ill-informed, yet binds the possessor 
of it : " and their conscience being weak, is defiled." For ex- 
ample — there could be no harm in eating the flesh of an ani- 
mal that had been offered to an idol or false god ; for a false 
god is nothing, and it is impossible for it to have contracted 
positive defilement by being offered to that w^hich is a posi- 
tive and absolute negation. And yet if any man thought it 
wrong to eat such flesh, to him it was wrong ; for in that act 
there would be a deliberate act of transgression — a delibe- 
rate preference of that w^hich was mere enjoyment, to that 
which was apparently, though it may be only apparently, 
sanctioned by the law of God. And so it would carry with 



568 The Law of Christian Conscience, 

it all the disobedience, all the guilt, and all the misery whic^ 
belongs to the doing of an act altogether wrong ; or as St. 
Paul expresses it, the conscience would become defiled. 

Here, then, we arrive at the first distinction — the distinc- 
tion between absolute and relative right and wrong. Abso- 
lute right and absolute wrong, like absolute truth, can each 
be but one and unalterable in the sight of God. The one 
absolute right — the charity of God and the sacrifice of Christ 
—this, from eternity to eternity must be the sole measure of 
eternal right. But human right or human wrong — that is, 
the merit or demerit of any action done by any particular 
man — must be measured, not by that absolute standard, but 
as a matter relative to his particular circumstances, the state 
of the age in which he lives, and his own knowledge of right 
and wrong. For we come into this world with a moral 
sense ; or to speak more Christianly, with a conscience. And 
yet that will tell us but very little distinctly. It tells us 
broadly that which is right and that which is wrong, so that 
every child can understand this. That charity and self 
denial are right — this we see recognized in almost every na- 
tion*. But the boundaries of these two — when and how far 
self-denial is right — what are the bounds of charity — this it is 
for different circumstances yet to bring out and determine. 

And so it will be found that there is a difierent standard 
among different nations and in difierent ages. That, for ex- 
ample, which was the standard among the Israelites in the 
earlier ages, and before their settlement in Canaan, was very 
difierent from the higher and truer standard of right and 
wrong recognized by the later prophets. And the standard 
in the third and fourth centuries after Christ, was truly and 
unquestionably an entirely different one from that recognized 
in the nineteenth century among ourselves. 

Let me not be mistaken. I do not say that right and 
wrong are merely conventional, or merely chronological or 
geographical, or that they vary with latitude and longitude. 
I do not say that there ever was or ever can be a nation so 
utterly blinded and perverted in its moral sense as to ac- 
knowledge that which is wrong — seen and known to be 
wrong — as right ; or on the other hand, to profess that which 
is seen and understood as right, to be wrong. But what I 
do say is this: that the form and aspect in which different 
deeds appear, so vary, that there will be forever a change 
and alteration in men's opinions, and that which is really 
most generous may seem most base, and that which is really 
most base may appear most generous. So, for example, as I 
have already said, there are two things universally recog* 



The Law of Christian Conscience, 5O9 

nized — recognized as right by every man whose conscience 
is not absolutely perverted — charity and self-denial. The 
charity of God, the sacrifice of Christ — these are the two 
grand, leading principles of the Gospel ; and in some form or 
other you will find these lying at the roots of every profes- 
sion and state of feeling in almost every age. But the form 
in which these appear will vary with all the gradations which 
are to be found between the lowest savage state and the 
highest and most enlightened Christianity. 

For example, in ancient Israel the law of love was ex- 
pounded thus : — " Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate 
thine enemy." Among the American Indians and at the 
Cape, the only homage, perchance, given to self-denial, was 
the strange admiration given to that prisoner of war who 
bore with unflinching fortitude the torture of his country's 
enemies. In ancient India the same principle was exhibited, 
but in a more strange and perverted manner. The homage 
there given to self-denial, self-sacrifice, was this — that th(^ 
highest form of religion was considered to be that exhibited 
by the devotee who sat in a tree until the birds had built 
their nests in his hair — until his nails, like those of the King 
of Babylon, had grown like birds' talons — until they had 
grown into his hands — and he became absorbed into the Di- 
vinity. 

We will take another instance, and one better known. In 
ancient Sparta it was the custom to teach children to steal. 
And here there would seem to be a contradiction to our prop- 
osition — here it would seem as if right and wrong were mat- 
ters merely conventional ; for surely stealing can never be 
any thing but wrong. But if we look deeper we shall see 
that there is no contradiction here. It was not stealing 
which was admired ; the child was punished if the theft was 
discovered ; but it was the dexterity which was admired, 
and that because it was a warlike virtue, necessary, it may be, 
to a people in continual rivalry with their neighbors. It was 
not that honesty was despised and dishonesty esteemed, but 
that honesty and dishonesty were made subordinate to that 
which appeared to them of higher im'portance, namely, the 
duty of concealment. And so we come back to the principle 
which we laid down at first. In every age, among all na- 
tions, the same broad principle remains, but the application 
of it varies. The conscience may be ill-informed, and in this 
sense only are right and wrong conventional — varying with 
latitude and longitude, depending upon chronology and ge- 
ography. 

The principle laid down by the Apostle Paul is this : — A 



5 'JO The Law of Christian Conscience. 

man will be judged, not by the abstract law of God, not by 
the rule of absolute right, but much rather by the relative 
law of conscience. This he states most distinctlj^ — looking 
at the question on both sides. That which seems to a man 
to be right is, in a certain sense, right to him ; and that 
w^hich seems to a man to be wrong, in a certain sense is 
wrong to him. For example : he says in his Epistle to the 
Romans (ver. 14) that, "sin is not imputed when there is no 
law," in other words, if a man does not really know a thing 
to be wrong, there is a sense in which, if not right to him, it 
ceases to be so wrong as it would otherwise be. With re- 
spect to the other of these sides, however, the case is still 
more distinct and plain. Here, in the judgment which the 
apostle delivers in the parallel chapter of the Epistle to the 
Romans (the xivth), he says, " I know, and am persuaded of 
the Lord Jesus, that there is nothing unclean of itself: but 
to him that esteemeth any thing to be unclean, to him it is 
unclean." In other words, whatever may be the abstract 
merits of the question — however in God's jurisprudence any 
particular act may stand — to you, thinking it to be wrong, it 
manifestly is wrong, and your conscience will gather round 
it a stain of guilt if you do it. 

In order to understand this more fully, let us take a few 
instances. There is a difference between truth and veracity. 
Veracity — mere veracity — is a small, poor thing. Truth is 
something greater and higher. Veracity is merely the cor- 
respondence between some particular statement and facts — 
truth is the correspondence between a man's whole soul and 
reality. It is possible for a man to say that which, unknown 
to him, is false ; and yet he may be true : because if deprived 
of truth he is deprived of it unwillingly. It is possible, on 
the other hand, for a man to utter veracities, and yet at the 
very time that he is uttering those veracities, to be false to 
himself, to his brother, and to his God. One of the most sig- 
nal instances of this is to be seen in the Book of Job. Most 
of what Job's friends said to him were veracious statements. 
Much of what Job said for himself was unveracious and mis- 
taken. And yet thoSfe veracities of theirs were so torn from 
all connection with fact and truth, that they became false- 
hoods ; and they were, as has been said, nothing more than 
" orthodox liars " in the sight of God. On the other hand, 
Job, blundering perpetually, and falling into false doctrine, 
was yet a true man — searching for and striving after the 
truth ; and if deprived of it for a time, deprived of it with all 
his heart and soul unwillingly^ And therefore it was that at 
i^st the Lord appeared out of the w^iirlwiud to confound the 



The Law of Christian Conscience. 571 

men of mere veracity, and to stand by and support the honor 
of the heartily true. 

Let us ajDply the pnnciple further. It is a matter of less 
importance that a man should state true views, than that he 
should state views truly. We will put this in its strongest 
form. Unitarianism is false — Trinitarianism is true. But 
yet in the sight of God, and with respect to a man's eternal 
destinies hereafter, it would surely be better for him earnest- 
ly, honestly, truly, to hold the doctrines of Unitarianism, 
than in a cowardly or indifferent spirit, or influenced by au- 
thority, or from considerations of interest, or for the sake of 
lucre, to hold the doctrines of Trinitarianism. 

For instance : Not many years ago the Church of Scot- 
land was severed into two great divisions, and gave to this 
age a marvellous proof that there is still amongst us the 
powder of living faith — when five hundred ministers gave up 
all that earth holds dear — position in the Church they had 
loved ; friendships and affections formed, and consecrated by 
long fellowship, in its communion ; and almost their hopes 
of gaining a livelihood — rather than assert a principle which 
eeemed to them to be a false one. Now, my brethren, sure- 
ly the question in such a case for us to consider is not this, 
merely — whether of the two sections held the abstract right 
• — held the principle in its integrity — but surely far rather, 
this : who on either side was true to the light within, true to 
God, true to the truth as God had revealed it to his soul. 

Now it is precisely upon this principle that we are ena- 
bled to indulge a Christian hope that many of those who in 
ancient times were persecutors, for example, may yet be 
justified at the bar of Christ. Nothing can make persecu- 
tion right — it is wrong, essentially, eternally wrong in the 
sight of God, And yet, if a man sincerely and assuredly 
thinks that Christ has laid upon him a command to perse- 
cute w^ith fire and sword, it is surely better that he should, 
in spite of all feelings of tenderness and compassion, cast 
aside the dearest affections at the command of his Redeem- 
er, than that he should, in mere laxity and tenderness, turn 
aside from what seemed to him to be his duty. At least, 
this appears to be the opinion of the Apostle Paul, He tells 
us that he was " a blasphemer and a persecutor and injuri- 
ous," that " he did many things contrary to the name of Je- 
sus of Nazareth," that "being exceedingly mad against the 
disciples, he persecuted them even unto strange cities." But 
he tells us further, that " for this cause he obtained mercy, 
because he did it ignorantly in unbelief" 

Now take a case precisely opposite : In ancient times the 



57^ The Law of Christian Conscience, 

Jews did that by which it appeared to them that they woiil^ 
contract defilement and guilt — they spared the lives of the 
enemies which they had taken in battle. Brethren, the eter- 
nal law is, that charity is right : and that law^ is eternally 
right which says, " Thou shalt love thine enemy." And had 
the Jews acted upon this principle they w^ould have done 
well to spare their enemies : but they did it, thinking it to 
be wrong, transgressing that law which commanded them to 
slay their idolatrous enemies — not from generosity, but in 
cupidity — not from charity, but from lax zeal. And so do- 
ing, the act was altogether wrong. 

II. Such is the apostle's exposition of the law of Christian 
conscience. Let us now, in the second place, consider the 
applications, both of a personal and of a public nature, which 
arise out of it. 

1. The first application is a personal one. It is this : — Do 
^hat seems to yoa to be right : it is only so that you will at 
last learn by the grace of God to see clearly what is right. 
A man thinks within himself that it is God's law and God's 
will that he should act thus and thus. There is nothing 
possible for us to say, there is no advice for us to give, but 
this — " You must so act." He is responsible for the opinions 
he holds, and still more for the way in which he arrived at 
them — whether in a slothful and selfish, or in an honest and 
truth-seeking manner ; but being now his soul's convictions, 
you can give no othei' law than this — " You must obey your 
conscience." For no man's conscience gets so seared by do- 
ing what is wrong unknowingly, as by doing that which ap- 
pears to be wrong to his conscience. The Jews' consciences 
did not get seared by their slaying the Canaanites, but they 
did become seared by their failing to do what appeared to 
them to be right. Therefore, woe to you if you do w^hat 
others think right, instead of obeying the dictates of your 
own conscience ; w^oe to you if you allow authority, or pre- 
scription, or fashion, or influence, or any other human thing, 
to interfere with that awful and sacred thing — responsibili- 
ty. " Every man," said the apostle, " must give an account 
of himself to God." 

2. The second application of this principle has reference 
to others. No doubt, to the large, free, enlightened mind of 
the Apostle Paul all these scruples and superstitions must 
have seemed mean, trivial, and small indeed. It was a mat- 
ter to him of far less importance that truth should be estab- 
lished than that it should be arrived at truly — a matter of 
far less importance, even, that right should be done, than 



The Law of Christian Conscience, 573 

tliat right should be done rightly. Conscience was far more 
sacred to him than even liberty — it was to him a prerogative 
far more precious to assert the rights of Christian conscience, 
than to magnify the privileges of Christian liberty. The 
scruple may be small and foolish, but it may be impossible 
to uproot the scruple without tearing up the feeling of the 
sanctity of conscience, and of reverence to the law of God, 
associated with this scruple. And therefore the Apostle 
Paul counsels these men to abridge their Christian liberty, 
and not to eat of those things which had been sacrificed to 
idols, but to have compassion upon the scruples of their 
weaker .brethren. 

And this, for two reasons. The first of these is a mere rea- 
son of Christian feeling. It might cause exquisite pain to 
sensitive minds to see those things which appeared to them 
to be wrong, done by Christian brethren. Now you may 
take a parallel case. It may be, if you will, mere supersti- 
tion to bow at the name of Jesus. It may be, and no doubt 
is, founded upon a mistaken interpretation of that passage in 
the Epistle to the Philippians (ii. 10), which says that "at 
the name of Jesus every knee shall bow." But there are 
many congregations in which this has been the long-estab- 
lished rule, and there are many Christians who would feel 
pained to see such a practice discontinued — as if it implied a 
declension from the reverence due to " that name which is 
above every name." Now what in this case is the Christian 
duty ? Is it this — to stand upon our Christian liberty ? Or 
is it not rather this — ^to comply with a prejudice which is 
manifestly a harmless one, rather than give pain to a Chris- 
tian brother ? 

Take another case. It may be a mistaken scruple ; but 
there is no doubt that it causes much pain to many Chris- 
tians to see a carriage used on the Lord's day. But you, 
with higher views of the spirit of Christianity, who know 
that "the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the 
sabbath" — who can enter more deeply into the truth taught 
by our blessed Lord, that every day is to be dedicated to 
Him and consecrated to His service — upon the high princi- 
ple of Christian liberty you can use your carriage — you can 
exercise your liberty. But if there are Christian brethren 
to whom this would give pain — then I humbly ask you, but 
most earnestly — What is the duty here ? Is it not this — to 
abridge your Christian liberty — and to go through rain, and 
mud, and snow, rather than give pain to one Christian con- 
science ? 

To give one more instance. The words, and garb, and 



574 ■ The Law of Christian Conscience, 

customs of that sect of Christians called Quakers may be 
formal enough ; founded, no doubt, as in the former case, 
upon a mistaken interpretation of a passage in the Bible. 
But they are at least harmless; and have long been asso- 
ciated with the simplicity, and benevolence, and Christian 
humbleness of this body of Christians — the followers of one 
who, three hundred years ago, set out upon the glorious en- 
terprise of making all men friends. Now would it be Chris- 
tian, or would it not rather be something more than unchris- 
tian — would it not be gross rudeness and coarse unfeeling- 
ness to treat such words, and habits, and customs, with any 
thing but respect and reverence ? 

Further : the apostle enjoined this duty upon the Corinth- 
ian converts, of abridging their Christian liberty, not mere- 
ly because it might give pain to indulge it, but also because 
it might even lead their brethren into sin. For, if any man 
should eat of the flesh offered to an idol, feeling himself 
justified by his conscience, it were well : but if any man, 
overborne by authority or interest, were to do this, not ac- 
cording to conscience, but against it, there would be a dis- 
tinct and direct act of disobedience — a conflict between his 
sense of right and the gratification of his appetites, or the 
power of influence ; and then his compliance would as much 
damage his conscience and moral sense as if the act had been 
wrong in itself. 

In the personal application of these remarks, there are 
three things which we have to say. The first is this : — Dis- 
tinguish, I pray you, between this tenderness for a brother's 
conscience and mere time-serving. This same apostle whom 
we here see so gracefully giving way upon the ground of 
expediency when Christian principles were left entire, was 
the same who stood firm and strong as a rock when any 
thing was demanded which trenched upon Christian princi- 
ple. When some required, as a matter of necessity for salva- 
tion, that these converts should be circumcised, the apostle 
says — "To whom we gave place by subjection, no, not for an 
hour !" It was not indifl*erence — it was not cowardice — it 
was not the mere love of peace, purchased by the sacrifice of 
principle, that prompted this counsel — but it was Christian 
love — that delicate and Christian love which dreads to tam- 
per with the sanctities of a brother's conscience. 

2. The second thing we have to say is this — ^^that this 
abridgment of their liberty is a duty more especially in- 
cumbent upon all who are possessed of influence. There are 
Bome men, happily for themselvos we may say, who are so in- 
significant that they can take their course quietly in the val 



The Law of Christian Conscience. 575 

leys of life, and who can exercise the fullest Christian liberty 
without giving pain to others. But it is the price Avhich all 
who are possessed of influence must pay — that their act^ 
must be measured, not in themselves, but according to their 
influence on others. So, my Christian brethren, to bring 
this matter home to every-day experience and common life, 
if the landlord uses his authority and influence to induce his 
tenant to vote against his conscience, it may be he has se- 
cured one voice to the principle which is right, or at all 
ev^ents, to that which seemed to him to be right : but he has 
gained that single voice at the sacrifice and expense of a 
brother's soul. Or again — if for the sake of insuring per- 
sonal politeness and attention, the rich man puts a gratuity 
into the hand of a servant of some company which has for- 
bidden him to receive it, he gains the attention, he insures 
the politeness, but he gains it at the sacrifice and expense of 
a man and a Christian brother. 

3. The last remark which we have to make is this : — 
How possible it is to mix together the vigor of a masculine 
and manly intellect with the tenderness and charity which is 
taught by the Gospel of Christ. No man ever breathed so 
freely when on earth the air and r.tmosj^here of heaven as the 
Apostle Paul — no man ever soared so high above all preju- 
dices, narrowness, littlenesses, scruples, as he : and yet no 
man ever bound himself as Paul bound himself to the igno- 
rance, the scruples, the prejudices of his brethren. So that 
what in other cases was infirmity, imbecility, and supersti- 
tion, gathered rounrl it in his case the pure high spirit of 
Christian charity and Christian delicacy. 

And now, out of the writings, and sayings, and deeds of 
those who loudly proclaim " the rights of man " and the 
" rights of liberty," match us, if you can, with one sentence 
so sublime, so noble, one that will so stand at the bar of 
God hereafter, as this single, glorious sentence of his, in 
which he asserts the rights of Christian conscience above the 
claims of Christian liberty — " Wherefore if meat make my 
brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world stani 
sth, lest I make my brother to offend." 



5/6 Victory over Death. 



XVII. 
VICTORY OVER DEATH. 

" The sting of death is sin ; and the strength of sin is the lavf. But 
thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus 
Christ."— I Cor. xv. 56, 57. 

On Sunday last I endeavored to bring before you the 
subject of that which Scripture calls the glorious liberty of 
the sons of God. The two points on which we were trying 
to get clear notions were these : what is meant by being uur 
der the law, and what is meant by being free from the law ? 
When the Bible says that a man led by the Spirit is not un- 
der the law, it does not mean that he is free because he may 
sin without being punished for it, but it means that he is 
free because, being taught by God's Spirit to love what His 
law commands, he is no longer conscious of acting from re- 
straint. The law does not drive him, because the Spirit 
leads him. 

There is a state, brethren, when we recognize God, but do 
not love God in Christ. It is that state when we admire 
what is excellent, but are not able to perform it. It is a 
state when the love of good comes to nothing, dying away 
in a mere desire. That is the state of nature, when we are 
under the law, and not converted to the love of Christ. 
And then there is another state, when God writes His law 
upon our hearts by love instead of fear. The one state is 
this, " I can not do the things that I would " — the other 
state is this, " I will walk at liberty ; for I seek Thy com- 
mandments." 

Just so far, therefore, as a Christian is led by the Spirit, he 
is a conqueror. A Christian in full possession of his privileges 
is a man whose very step ought to have in it all the elasticity 
of triumph, and whose very look ought to have in it all the 
brightness of victory. And just so far as a Christian suffers 
sin to struggle in him and overcome his resolutions, just so 
far he is under the law. And that is the key to the whole 
doctrine of the New Testament. From first to last the 
great truth put forward is — The law can neither save you 
nor sanctify you. The Gospel can do both ; for it is rightly 
and emphatically called the perfect law of liberty. 

TVe proceed to-day to a further illustration of this subject 



Victory over Death, 577 

—of Christian victory. In the verses which I have read out, 
the apostle has evidently the same subject in his mind: 
slavery through the lavv : victory through the Gospel. 
" The strength of sin," he says, " is the law." God giveth 
us the victory through Christ. And when we are familiar 
with St. Paul's trains of thinking, we find this idea coming in 
perpetually. It runs like a colored thread through embroid' 
ery, appearing on the upper surface every now and then in a 
different shape — a leaf, it may be, or a flower; but the same 
thread still, if you only trace it back with your finger. And 
this was the golden recurring thread in the mind of Paul. 
Restraint and law can not check sin ; they only gall it and 
make it struggle and rebel. The love of God in Christ, that, 
dnd only that, can give man the victory. 

But in this passage the idea of victory is brought to bear 
upon the most terrible of all — a Christian's enemies. It is 
faith here conquering in death. And the apostle brings to- 
gether all the believer's antagonists — the law's power, sin, 
and death the chief antagonist of all: and then, as it were on 
a conqueror's battle-field, shouts over them the hymn of tri- 
umph — " Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory, 
through our Lord Jesus Christ." We shall take up these 
two points to dwell upon : 

I. The awfulness which hangs round the dying hour. 
n. Faith conquering in death. 

That which makes it peculiarly terrible to die is asserted 
In this passage to be guilt. We lay a stress upon this ex- 
pression — the sting. It is not said that sin is the only bit- 
terness, but it is the sting w^hich contains in it the venom of 
a most exquisite torture. And in truth, brethren, it is no 
mark of courage to speak lightly of human dying. We may 
do it in bravado, or in wantonness ; but no man who thinks 
can call it a trifling thing to die. True thoughtfulness must 
shrink from death without Christ. There is a world of un- 
told sensations crowded into that moment when a man puts 
his hand to his forehead and feels the damp upon it which 
tells him his hour is come. He has been waiting for death 
all his life, and now it is come. It is all over — his chance is 
past, and his eternity is settled. None of us know, except 
by guess, what that sensation is. Myriads of human beings 
have felt it to whom life was dear ; but they never spoke out 
their feelings, for such things are untold. And to every indi- 
vidual man throughout all eternity that sensation in its full* 
ness can come but once. It is mockery, brethren, for a man 
to speak lightly of that which he can not know till it come*. 



57^ Victory over Death. 

N'ow the first cause which makes it a solemn thing to die 
is the instinctive cleaving of every thing that lives to its own 
existence. That unutterable thing which we call our being 
— the idea of parting with it is agony. It is the first and 
the intensest desire of living things, to be. Enjoyment, 
blessedness, every thing we long for, is wrapped up in being. 
Darkness and all that the spirit recoils from, is contained in 
this idea, not to be. It is in virtue of this unquenchable im- 
pulse that the world, in spite of all the misery that is in it. 
continues to struggle on. What are war, and trade, and la- 
bor, and professions ? Are they all the result of struggling 
to be great ? No, my brethren, they are the result of strug- 
gling to he. The first thing that men and nations labor for 
is existence. Reduce the nation or the man to their last re- 
sources, and only see what marvellous energy of contrivance 
the love of being arms them with. Read back the pauper's 
history at the end of seventy years — his strange sad history, 
in which scarcely a single day could insure subsistence for 
the morrow — and yet learn what he has done these long 
years in the stern struggle with impossibility to hold his be- 
ing where every thing is against him, and to keep an ex- 
istence whose only conceivable charm is this, that it is exist- 
ence. 

Now it is with this intense passion for being that the idea 
of death clashes. Let us search why it is we shrink from 
death. This reason, brethren, we shall find, that it presents 
to us the idea of not being. Talk as we will of immortality, 
there is an obstinate feeling that we can not master, that we 
end in death ; and that may be felt together with the firmest 
belief of a resurrection. Brethren, our faith tells us one 
thing, and our sensations tell us another. When we die, we 
are surrendering in truth all that with which we have asso- 
ciated existence. All that we know of life is connected with 
a shape, a form, a body of materialism ; and now that that is 
palpably melting away into nothingness, the boldest heart 
may be excused a shudder, when there is forced upon it, in 
spite of itself, the idea of ceasing forever. 

The second reason is not one of imagination at all, but 
most sober reality. It is a solemn thing to die, because it is 
the parting with all round which the heart's best affections 
have twined themselves. There are some men who have not 
the capacity for keen enjoyment. Their affections have noth- 
ing in them of intensity, and so they pass through life without 
ever so uniting themselves with what they meet, that there 
would be any thing of pain in the severance. Of course, 
with them the bitterness of death does not attach so much to 



Victory over Death, 579 

the idea of parting. But, my brethren, how is it with human 
nature generally ? Our feelings do not weaken as we go on 
in life ; emotions are less shown, -and we get a command over 
our features and our expressions ; but the man's feelings are 
deeper than the boy's. It is length of time that makes at- 
tachment. We become wedded to the sights and sounds of 
this lovely world more closely as years go on. 

Young men, with nothing rooted deep, are prodigal of life. 
It is an adventure to them, rather than a misfortune, to leave 
their country forever. With the old man it is like tearing 
his own heart from him. And so it was that when Lot quit- 
ted Sodom the younger members of his family went on gladly. 
It is a touching truth ; it was the aged one who looked be- 
hind to the home which had so many recollections connected 
with it. And therefore it is, that when men approach that 
period of existence when they must go, there is an instinctive 
lingering over things which they shall never see again. Every 
time the sun sets, every time the old man sees his children 
gathering round him, there is a filling of ihe eye with an 
emotion that we can understand. There is upon his soul the 
thought of parting, that strange wrench from all we love, 
which makes death (say what moralists will of it) a bitter 
thing. 

Another pang which belongs to death we find in the sen- 
sation of loneliness which attaches to it. Have we ever seen 
a ship preparing to sail with its load of pauper emigrants to 
a distant colony ? If we have we know what that desolation 
is which comes from feeling unfriended on a new and untried 
excursion. All beyond the seas, to the ignorant poor man, 
is a strange land. They are going away from the helps and 
the friendships and the companionships of life, scarcely know- 
ing what is before them. And it is in such a moment, when 
a man stands upon a deck taking his last look of his father- 
land, that there comes upon him a sensation new, strange, 
and inexpressibly miserable — the feeling of being alone in 
the world. 

Brethren, with all the bitteraess of such a moment, it is 
but a feeble image when placed by the side of the loneliness 
of death. We die alone. We go on our dark mysterious 
journey for the first time in all our existence, without one to 
accompany us. Friends are beside our bed, they must stay 
behind. Grant that a Christian has something like familiar- 
ity with the Most High, that breaks this solitary feeling; 
but what is it with the mass of men ? It is a question full 
of loneliness to them. What is it they are to see? What 
are they to meet ? Is it not true, that, to the larger numbel 



580 Victory over Death. 

of this congregation, there is no one point in all eternity on 
which the eye can iix distinctly and rest gladly — nothing 
beyond the grave, except a dark space into which they must 
plunge alone ? 

And yet, my brethren, with all these ideas no doubt vivid- 
ly before his mind, it was none of them that the apostle se- 
lected as the crowning bitterness of dying. It was not the 
thought of surrendering existence. It was not the parting 
from all bright and lovely things. It was not the shudder of 
sinking into the sepulchre alone. " The sting of death is sin." 

Now there are two ways in which this deep truth applies 
itself. There is something that appals in death when there 
are distinct separate acts of guilt resting on the memory ; 
and there is something, too, in the possession of a guilty 
heart which is quite another thing from acts of sin, that 
makes it an awful thing to die. There are some who carry 
about with them the dreadful secret of sin that has been 
done ; guilt that has a name. A man has injured some one ; 
he has made money, or got on by unfair means ; he has been 
unchaste ; he has done some of those thousand things of life 
which leave upon the heart the dark spot that will not come 
out. All these are sins which you can count up and num- 
ber. And the recollection of things like these is that agony 
which we call remorse. Many of us have remembrances 01 
this kind which are fatal to serenity. We shut them out, 
but it will not do. They bide their time, and then suddenly 
present themselves, together with the thought of a judg- 
ment-seat. When a guilty man begins to think of dying, it 
is like a vision of the Son of Man presenting itself and call- 
ing out the voices of all the unclean spirits in the man — 
" Art thou come to torment us before the time ?" 

But, my brethren, it is a mistake if we suppose that is the 
common way in which sin stings at the thought of death. 
Men who have lived the career of passionate life have dis- 
tinct and accumulated acts of guilt before their eyes. But 
with most men it is not guilty acts, but guiltiness of heart 
that weighs the heaviest. Only take yesterday as a speci- 
men of life. What was it with most of us? A day of sin. 
Was it sin palpable and dark, such as we shall remember 
painfully this day year ? Nay, my brethren, unkindness, 
petulance, wasted time, opportunities lost, frivolous conversa- 
tion, that was our chief guilt. And yet with all that, trifling, 
as it may be, when it comes to be the history of life does it 
not leave behind a restless unclefinable sense of fjiult, a vague 
idea of debt, but to Avhat extent we know not, perhaps tha 
more wretched just because it is uncertain ? 



Victory over Death. 581 

My Christian brethren, this is the sting of sinfulness, the 
wretched consciousness of an unclean heart. It is just this 
feeling, " God is not my friend ; I am going on to the grave, 
and no rticin can say aught against me, but my heart is not 
right ; I want a river like that which the ancients fabled — ■ 
the river of forgetfulness — that I might go down into it and 
bathe, and come up a new man. It is not so much what I 
have done ; it is what I am. Who shall save me from my- 
self?" Oh, it is a desolate thing to think of the coffin when 
that thought is in all its misery before the soul. It is the 
sting of death. 

And now let us bear one thing in mind — the sting of sin 
is not a constant pressure. It may be that we live many 
years in the world before a death in our own family forces 
the thought personally home : many years before all those 
sensations w^hich are so often the precursors of the tomb — 
the quick short cough, lassitude, emaciation, pain — come in 
startling suddenness upon us in our young vigor, and make 
us feel w^hat it is to be here wuth death inevitable to our- 
selves. And when those things become habitual, habit 
makes delicacy the same forgetfiil thing as health, so that 
neither in sickness nor in health is the thought of death a 
constant pressure. It is only now and then ; but so often 
as death is a reality, the sting of death is sin. 

Once more : we remark that all this power of sin to ago- 
nize is traced by the apostle to the law — " the strength of 
sin is the law^;" by which he means to say that sin would 
not be so violent if it were not for the attempt of God's law 
to restrain it. It is the law which makes sin strong. And 
he does not mean particularly the law of Moses. He means 
any law, and all law. Law is what forbids and threatens ; 
law bears gallingly on those w^ho want to break it. And 
St. Paul declares this, that no law, not even God's law, can 
make men righteous in heart, unless the Spirit has taught 
men's hearts to acquiesce in the law. It can only force out 
into rebellion the sin that is in them. 

It is so, brethren, with a nation's law. The voice of the 
nation must go along with it. It must be the expression of 
their own feeling, and then they will have it obeyed. But 
if it is only the law of a government, a law which is against 
the whole spirit of the people, there is first the murmur of a 
nation's disapprobation, and then there is transgression, and 
then, if the law^ be vindicated with a high hand, the next 
step is the bursting that law asunder in national revolution. 
And so it is w4th God's law\ It will never control a man 
long who does not from his heart love it. First comes a 



582 Victory over Death, 

sensation of restraint, and then comes a murmuring of tho 
heart ; and last, there comes the rising of passion in its giant 
might, made desperate by restraint. That is the law giving 
strength to sin. 

And therefore, brethren, if all we know of God be this, 
that He has made laws, and that it is terrible to break them ; 
if all our idea of religion be this, that it is a thing of com- 
mands and hindrances — thou shalt, and thou shalt not ; we 
are under the law, and there is no help for it. We mu8i 
shrink from the encounter with death. 

We pass to our second subject — Faith conquering in 
death. 

And, before we enter upon this topic, there are two gen- 
eral remarks that we have to make. The first is. The ele- 
vating power of faith. There is nothing in all this world 
that ever led man on to real victory but faith. Faith is that 
looking forward to a future with something like certainty, 
that raises man above the narrow feelings of the present. 
Even in this life he is a greater man, a man of more elevated 
character, who is steadily pursuing a plan that requires some 
years to accomplish, than he who is living by the day. Look 
forward but ten years, and plan for it, live for it ; there is 
something of manhood, something of courage required to 
conquer the thousand things that stand in your way. And 
therefore it is, that faith, and nothing but faith, gives victory 
in death. It is that elevation of character which we get 
from looking steadily and forever forward till eternity be- 
comes a real home to us, that enables us to look down upon 
the last struggle, and the funeral, and the grave, not as the 
great end of all, but only as something that stands between 
us and the end. We are conquerors of death when we are 
able to look beyond it. 

Our second remark is for the purpose of fixing special at- 
tention upon this, that ours is not merely to be victory, it is 
to be victory through Christ. "Thanks be to God which 

fiveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." 
Ictory, brethren, mere victory over death, is no unearthly 
thing. You may get it by infidelity. Only let a man sin 
long enough, and desperately enough, to shut judgment al- 
together out of his creed, and then you have a man who can 
bid defiance to the grave. It was so that our country's 
greatest infidel historian met death. He quitted the world 
without parade and without display. If we want a speci- 
men of victory apart from Christ, we have it on his death- 
bed. He left all this strange world of restlessness calmly, 



Victory over Death, 583 

like an unreal show that must go to pieces, and he himself 
an unreality departing from it. A skeptic can be a conquer 
or in death. 

Or again, mere manhood may give us a victory. He who 
has only learned not to be afraid to die, has not learned 
much. We have steel and nerve enough in our hearts to 
dare any thing. And, after all, it is a triumph so common as 
scarcely to deserve the name. Felons die on the scaffold like 
men ; soldiers can be hired by tens of thousands, for a few 
pence a day, to front death in its worst form. Every minute 
that we live sixty of the human race are passing away, and 
the greater part with courage — the weak and the timid as 
well as the resolute. Courage is a very different thing from 
the Christian's victory. 

Once more, brethren, necessity can make man conqueror 
over death. We can make up our minds to any thing when 
it once becomes inevitable. It is the agony of suspense that 
makes danger dreadful. History can tell us that men can 
look with desperate calmness upon hell itself when once it 
has become a certainty. And it is this, after all, that com- 
monly makes the dying hour so quiet a thing. It is more 
dreadful in the distance than in the reality. When a man 
feels that there is no help, and he must go, he lays him down 
to die quietly as a tired traveller wraps himself in his cloak 
to sleep. It is quite another thing from all this that Paul 
meant by victory. 

In the first place, it is the prerogative of a Christian to be 
conqueror over doubt. Brethren, do we all know what 
doubt means ? Perchance not. There are some men who 
have never believed enough to doubt. There are some who 
have never thrown their hopes with such earnestness on the 
world to come, as to feel anxiety for fear it should not all be 
true. But every on^ who knows Avhat faith is, knows too 
what is the desolation of doubt. We pray till we begin to 
ask. Is there one who hears, or am I whispering to inyself ? 
We hear the consolation administered to the bereaved, and 
we see the coffin lowered into the grave, and the thought 
comes. What if all this doctrine of a life to come be but the 
dream of man's imaginative mind, carried on from age to age, 
and so believed, because it is a venerable superstition ? Now 
Christ gives us victory over that terrible suspicion in two 
ways — first, He does it by His own resurrection. We have 
got a fact there that all the metaphysics about impossibility 
can not rob us of In moments of perplexity we look back 
to this. The grave has once, and more than once, at the 
Redeenier's bidding, given up its dead. It is a world-fact. 



5 84 Victory over Death, 

It tells us what the Bible means by our resurrection — not a 
spiritual rising into new holiness merely — that, but also 
something more. It means that in our own proper identity 
we shall live again. Make that thought real, and God has 
given you, so far, victory over the grave through Christ. 

There is another way in which we get the victory over 
doubt, and that is by living in Christ. All doubt comes 
from living out of habits of affectionate obedience to God 
By idleness, by neglected prayer, we lose our power of real- 
izino: thinojs not seen. Let a man be relis^ious and irreli^^ious 
at intervals — irregular, inconsistent, without some distmct 
thing to live for — it is a matter of impossibility that he can 
be free from doubts. He must make up his mind for a dark 
life. Doubts can only be dispelled by that kind of active life 
that realizes Christ. And there is no faith that gives a vic- 
tory so steadily triumphant as that. When such a man 
comes near the opening of the vault, it is no world of sor- 
rows he is entering upon. He is only going to see things 
that he has felt, for he has been living in heaven. He has 
his grasp on things that other men are only groping after 
and touching now and then. Live above this world, breth- 
ren, and then the powers of the world to come are so upon 
you that there is no room for doubt. 

Besides all this, it is a Christian's privilege to have victory 
over the fear of death. And here it is exceedingly easy to 
paint what, after all, is only the image-picture of a dying 
hour. It is the easiest thing to represent the dying Chris- 
tian as a man who always sinks into the grave full of hope, 
full of triumph, in the certain hope of a blessed resurrection. 
Brethren, we must paint things in the sober colors of truth ; 
not as they might be supposed to be, but as they are. Often 
that is only a picture. Either very few death-beds are Chris- 
tian ones, or else triumph is a very different thing from what 
the word generally implies. Solemn, subdued, full of awe 
and full of solemnity, is the dying hour generally of the holi- 
est men : sometimes almost darkness. Rapture is a rare 
thing, except in books and scenes. 

Let us understand what really is the victory over fear 
It may be rapture or it may not. All that depends very 
much on temperament ; and after all, the broken w^ords of 
a dying man are a very poor index of his real state before 
God. Rapturous hope has been granted to martyrs in pe- 
culiar moments. It is on record of a minister of our own 
Church, that his expectation of seeing God in Christ became 
30 intense as his last hour drew near, that his physician was 
compelled to bid him calm his transj^orts, because ij> so ex- 



Victory over Death, 585 

L-ited a state he could not die. A strange unnatural energy 
Avas imparted to his muscular frame by his nerves over- 
strung with triumph. But, brethren, it fosters a dangerous 
feeling to take cases like those as precedents. It leads to 
that most terrible of all unrealities — the acting of a death' 
bed scene. A Christian conqueror dies calmly. Brave men 
in battle do not boast that they are not afraid. Courage is 
so natural to them that they are not conscious they are do- 
ing any thing out of the common way — Christian bravery is 
a deep, calm thing, unconscious of itself There are more 
triumphant death-beds than we count, if we only remember 
this — true fearlessness makes no parade. 

Oh, it is not only in those passionate effusions in which the 
ancient martyrs spoke sometimes of panting for the crushing 
of their limbs by the lions in the amjjhitheatre, or of holding 
out their arms to embrace the flames that were to curl round 
them — it is not then only that Christ has stood by His serv- 
ants, and made them more than conquerors : there may be 
something of earthly excitement in all that. Every day His 
servants are dying modestly and peacefully — not a word of 
victory on their lips; but Christ's deep triumph in their 
hearts — watching the slow progress of their own decay, and 
yet so far emancipated from personal anxiety that they are 
still able to think and to plan for others, not knowing that 
they are doing any great thing. They die, and the world 
hears nothing of them ; and yet theirs was the completest 
victory. They came to the battle-field, the field to which 
they had been looking forward all their lives, and the enemy 
was not to be found. There was no foe to fight with. 

The last form in which a Christian gets the victory over 
death is by means of his resurrection. It seems to have been 
this which was chiefly alluded to by the apostle here ; for he 
says, " When this corruptible shall have put on incorruption 
.... then shall come to pass the saying which is written, 
Death is swallowed up in victory." And to say the truth, 
brethren, it is a rhetorical expression rather than a sober 
truth when we call any thing, except the resurrection, victory 
over death. We may conquer doubt and fear when we are 
dying, but that is not conquering death. It is like a warrior 
crushed to death by a superior antagonist refusing to yield a 
groan, and bearing the glance of defiance to the last. You 
feel that he is an unconquerable spirit, but he is not the con- 
queror. And when you see flesh melting away, and mental 
power becoming infantine in its feebleness, and lips scarcely 
able to articulate, is there left one moment a doubt upon the 
mind as to who is the conqueror, in spite of all the unshaken 



586 Victory over Death. 

fortitude there may be ? The victory is on the side of death, 
not on the side of the dying. 

And, my brethren, if we would enter into the full feeling of 
triumph contained in this verse, we must just try to bear in 
mind what this world would be without the thought of a 
resurrection. If we could conceive an unselfish man looking 
upon this world of desolation wath that infinite compassion 
which all the brave and good feel, what conception could he 
have but that of defeat, and failure, and sadness — the sons 
of man mounting into a bright existence, and one after an- 
other falling back into darkness and nothingness, like soldiers 
trying to mount an impracticable breach, and falling back 
crushed and mangled into the ditch before the bayonets and 
the rattling fire of their conquerors. Misery and guilt, look 
which way you will, till the heart gets sick with looking at it. 

Brethren, until a man looks on evil till it seems to him al- 
most like a real personal enemy rejoicing over the destruc- 
tion that it has made, he can scarcely conceive the deep rap- 
ture which rushed into the mind of the Apostle Paul when 
he remembered that a day was coming when all this was to 
be reversed. A day was coming, and it w^as the day of re- 
ality for which he lived, ever present and ever certain, when 
this sad w^orld was to put oW forever its changefulness and 
its misery, and the grave was to be robbed of its victory, 
and the bodies were to come forth purified by their long 
sleep. He called all this a victory, because he felt that it 
was a real battle that has to be fought and won before that 
can be secured. One battle has been fought by Christ, and 
another battle, most real and difiicult, but yet a conquering 
one, is to be fought by us. He hath imparted to us the vir- 
tue of His wrestlings, and the strength of His victory. So 
that, when the body shall rise again, the power of the law to 
condemn is gone, because we have learned to love the law. 

And now, to conclude all this, there are but two things 
which remain to say. In the first place, brethren, if we would 
be conquerors we must realize God's love in Christ. Take 
care not to be under the law. Constraint never yet made a 
conqueror : the utmost it can do is to make either a rebel or 
a slave. Believe that God loves you. He gave a triumphant 
demonstration of it in the cross. Never shall we conquer 
self till we have learned to love. My Christian brethren, let 
us remember our high privilege. Christian life, so far as it 
deserves the name, is victory. We are not going forth to 
mere battle — we are going forth to conquer. To gain mas- 
tery over self, and sin, and doubt, and fear: till the last cold- 
ness, coming across the brow, tells us that all is over and 



Victory over Death, 587 

our warfare accomplished — that we are safe, the everlasting 
arms beneath us — that is our calling. Brethren beloved, do 
not be content with a slothful, dreamy, uncertain struggle. 
You are to conquer, and the banner under which we are to 
win is not fear, but love. " The strength of sin is the law ;" 
the victory is by keeping before us God in Christ. 

Lastly, there is need of encouragement for those of us 
whose faith is not of the conquering, but the timid kind. 
There are some whose hearts will reply to all this. Surely 
victory is not always a Christian's portion. Is there no cold 
dark watching in Christian life — no struggle when victory 
seems a mockery to speak of — no times when light and life 
seem feeble, and Christ is to us but a name, and death a real- 
ity ? " Perfect love casteth out fear," but who has it ? Vic- 
tory is by faith, but, O God^ who will tell us what this faith 
is that men speak of as a thing so easy ; and how we are to 
get it ! You tell us to pray for faith, but how shall we 
pray in earnest unless we first have the very faith we pray 
for? 

My Christian brethren, it is just to this deepest cry of the 
human heart that it is impossible to return a full answer. 
All that is true. To feel faith is the grand difiiculty of life. 
Faith is a deep impression of God and God's love, and per- 
sonal trust in it. It is easy to say, " Believe, and thou shalt 
be saved," but well we know it is easier said than done. We 
can not say how men are to get faith. It is God's gift, al- 
most in the same way that genius is. You can not work/b/ 
faith; you must have it first, and then work/rom it. 

But, brethren beloved, we can say, Look up, though we 
know not how the mechanism of the will which directs the 
eye is to be put in motion ; we can say, Look to God in 
Christ, though we know not how men are to obtain faith to 
do it. Let us be in earnest. Our polar star is the love of 
the cross. Take the eye off that, and you are in darkness 
and bewilderment at once. Let us not mind what is past. 
Perhaps it is all failure, and useless struggle, and broken re- 
solves. What then ? Settle this first, brethren, Are you in 
earnest ? If so, though your faith be weak and your strug- 
gles unsatisfactory, you may begin the hymn of triumph now^ 
for victory is pledged. "Thanks be to God, which" — not 
%hall give, but — '''' giveth us the victory through our Lord Je 
BUS Christ." 



588 Man's Greatness and God's Greatness^ 



XVIIL 
MAN'S GREATNESS AND GOD'S GREATNESS. 

*'ror thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose 
name is Holy ; I dwell in the high and holy place, wdth him also that is of a 
contrite and hmnble spirit." — Isa. Ivii. 15. 

The origin of this announcement seems to have been the 
state of contempt in which religion found itself in the days 
of Isaiah. One of the most profligate monarchs that ever dis- 
graced the page of sacred history sat upon the throne of Ju- 
dah. His court was filled with men who recommended them- 
selves chiefly by their licentiousness. The altar was for- 
saken. Sacrilegious hands had placed the abominations of 
heathenism in the Holy Place ; and piety, banished from the 
State, the Church, and the royal Court, was once more as she 
had been before, and will be again, a wanderer on the face of 
the earth. 

Now, however easy it may be to contemplate such a state 
of things at a distance, it never takes place in a man's own 
day and time, without suggesting painful perplexities of a 
twofold nature. In the first place, suspicions respecting 
God's character ; and, in the second place, misgivings as to 
his own duty. For a faithless heart whispers. Is it worth 
while to suffer for a sinking cause? Honor, preferment, 
grandeur, follow in the train of unscrupulous conduct. To 
be strict in goodness is to be pointed at and shvmned. To 
be no better than one's neighbors is the only way of being 
at peace. It seems to have been to such a state as this that 
Isaiah was commissioned to bring light. He vindicated 
God's character by saying that He is " the high and lofty 
One that inhabiteth eternity." He encouraged those who 
were trodden down to perseverance, by reminding them that 
real dignity is something very different from present success. 
God dwells with him " that is of a contrite and humble spir* 
it." We consider — 

I. That in which the greatness of God consists. 
11. That in which man's greatness consists. 

I. The first measurement, so to speak, which is given us of 
God's greatness, is in respect of Time. He inhabiteth eter- 
nity. There are some subjects on Avhich it would be good 



Mans Greatness and God's Greatness, 589 

to dwell, if it were only for the sake of that enlargement of 
mind which is produced by their contemplation. And eter- 
nity is one of these, so that you can not steadily fix the 
thoughts upon it without being sensible of a peculiar kind 
of elevation, at the same time that you are humbled by a 
personal feeling of utter insignificance. You have come in 
contact with something so immeasurable — beyond the nar- 
row range of our common speculations — that you are exalted 
by the very conception of it. Now the only way we have 
of forming any idea of eternity is by going, step by step, up 
to the largest measures of time we know of, and so as- 
cending, on and on, till we are lost in wonder. We can not 
grasp eternity, but we can learn something of it by perceiv- 
ing that, rise to what portion of time we will, eternity is 
vaster than the vastest. 

\Ye take up, for instance, the history of our own country, 
and then, when we have spent months in mastering the mere 
outline of those great events which, in the slow course of re- 
volving centuries, have made England what she is, her earlier 
ages seem so far removed from our own times that they ap- 
pear to belong to a hoary and most remote antiquity. But 
then, when you compare those times with even the existing 
TV^orks of man, and when you remember that, when England 
was yet young in civilization, the pyramids of Egypt were 
already gray with 1500 years, you have got another step 
which impresses you with a doubled amount of vastness. 
Double that period, and you come to the far distant moment 
when the present aspect of this world was called, by crea- 
tion, out of the formless void in which it was before. 

Modern science has raised us to a pinnacle of thought be- 
yond even this. It has commanded us to think of countless 
ages in which that formless void existed before it put on the 
aspect of its present creation. Millions of years before God 
called the light day, and the darkness night, there was, if 
science speaks true, creation after creation called into exist- 
ence, and buried in its own ruins upon the surface of this 
earth. And then, there was a time beyond even this — there 
was a moment when this earth itself, with all its countless 
creations and innumerable ages, did not exist. And again, 
in that far back distance it is more than conceivable, it seems 
by the analogy of God's dealings next to certain, that ten 
thousand worlds may have been called into existence, and 
lasted their unnumbered ages, and then perished in succes- 
sion. Compared with these stupendous figures, 6000 years 
of our planet sink into nothingness. The mind is lost in 
dwelling on such thoughts as these. When you have pene 



590 Mans Greatness and God's Greatness. 

trated far, far back, by successive approximations, and still 
see the illimitable distance receding before you as distant 
as before, imagination absolutely gives way, and you feel 
dizzy and bewildered with new strange thoughts, that have 
not a name. 

But this is only one aspect of the case. It looks only tc 
time past. The same overpowering calculations wait us 
when we bend our eyes on that which is to come. Time 
stretches back immeasurably, but it also stretches on and on 
forever. Now it is by such a conception as this that the in- 
spired prophet attempts to measure the immeasurable of God. 
All that eternity, magnificent as it is, never was without an 
inhabitant. Eternity means nothing by itself. It merely 
expresses the existence of the high and lofty One that inhab- 
iteth it. We make a fanciful distinction between eternity 
and time-^there is no real distinction. We are in eternity 
at this moment. That has begun to be with us which never 
began with God. Our only measure of time is by the suc- 
cession of ideas. If ideas flow fas.t, and many sights and 
many thoughts pass by us, time seems lengthened. If we 
have the simple routine of a few engagements, the same ev- 
ery day, with little variety, the years roll by us so fast that 
we can not mark them. It is not so with God. There 
is no succession of ideas with Him. Every possible idea is 
present with Him now. It was present with Him ten 
thousand years ago. God's dwelling-place is that eternity 
which has neither past nor future, but one vast, immeasurable 
present. 

There is a second measure given us of God in this verse. 
It is in respect of Space. He dwelleth in the high and lofty 
place. He dwelleth moreover in the most insignificant place 
— even the heart of man. And the idea by which the proph- 
et would here exhibit to us the greatness of God is that of 
His eternal omnipresence. It is difiicult to say which con- 
ception carries with it the greatest exaltation — that of bound- 
less space or that of unbounded time. When we pass from 
the tame and narrow scenery of our own country, and stand 
on those spots of earth in which nature puts on her wilder 
and more awful forms, we are conscious of something of the 
grandeur which belongs to the thought of space. Go where 
the strong foundations of the earth lie around you in their 
massive majesty, and mountain after mountain rears its 
snow to heaven in a giant chain, and then, when this bursts 
upon you for the first time in life, there is that peculiar feel- 
ing which we call, in common language, an enlargement of 
ideas. But when we are told that the sublimit v of those 



Mans Greatness and God's Greatness, 591 

dizzy heights is but a nameless speck in comparison with the 
globe of which they form the girdle ; and when we pass on 
to think of that globe itself as a minute spot in the mighty 
system to w^hich it belongs, so that our world might be an- 
nihilated and its loss would not be felt ; and when we are 
told that eighty millions of such systems roll in the world 
of space, to which our own system again is as nothing ; and 
when we are again pressed with the recollection that beyond 
those farthest limits creative power is exerted immeasurably 
farther than eye can reach or thought can penetrate ; then, 
brethren, the awe which comes upon the heart is only, after 
all, a tribute to a portion of God's greatness. 

Yet we need not science to teach us this. It is the thought 
which oppresses very childhood — the overpowering thought 
of space. A child can put his head upon his hands, and 
think and think till it reaches in imagination some far dis- 
tant barrier of the universe, and still the difficulty presents 
itself to his young mind, "And what is beyond that barrier ?" 
and the only answer is, " The high and lofty place." And 
this, brethren, is the inward seal with which God has stamped 
Himself upon man's heart. If every other trace of Deity has 
been expunged by the fall, these two, at least, defy destruc- 
tion — the thought of eternal time, and the thought of im- 
measurable space. 

The third measure which is given us of God respects His 
character. His name is Holy. The chief idea which this 
would convey to us is separation from evil. Brethren, there 
is perhaps a time drawing near when those of us who shall 
stand at His right hand, purified from all evil taint, shall be 
able to comprehend absolutely what is meant by the holi 
ness of God. At present, with hearts cleaving down to 
earth, and tossed by a thousand gusts of unholy passion, we 
can only form a dim conception relatively of that which it 
implies. None but the pure can understand purity. The 
chief knowledge which we have of God's holiness comes 
from our acquaintance with unholiness. We know what 
impurity is — God is not that. We know what injustice is — 
God is not that. We know what restlessness, and guilt, and 
passion are, and deceitfulness, and pride, and waywardness — 
all these we know. God is none of these. And this is our 
chief acquaintance with His character. We know what God 
is not. We scarcely can be rightly said to know, that is to 
feel, what God is. And therefore this is implied in the very 
name of holiness. Holiness in the Jewish sense means sim- 
ply separateness. From all that is wrong, and mean, and 
base, our God is forever separate. 



592 Mans Greatness and God's Greatness 

There is another way in which God gives to us a concep 
tion of what this holiness implies. Tell us of His justice, 
His truth, His loving-kindness. All these are cold abstrac- 
tions. They convey no distinct idea of themselves to oui 
hearts. What we wanted was, that these should be exhib 
ited to us in tangible reality. And it is just this which 
God has done.- He has exhibited all these attributes, not 
in the light of speculatio7i^ but in the light oi facts. He 
has given us His own character in all its delicacy of color- 
ing in the history of Christ. Love, mercy, tenderness, 
purity — these are no mere names when we see them brought 
out in the human actions of our Master. Holiness is 
only a shadow to our minds, till it receives shape and sub- 
stance in the life of Christ. All this character of holiness 
is intelligible to us in Christ. " No man hath seen God at 
any time, the only begotten of the Father He hath declared 
Him." 

There is a third light in which God's holiness is shown to 
as, and that is in the sternness with which He recoils from 
guilt. When Christ died for man, I know what God's love 
means; and when Jesus wept human tears over Jerusalem, I 
know what God's compassion means ; and when the stern 
denunciations of Jesus rung in the Pharisees' ears, I can com- 
prehend what God's indignation is; and when Jesus stood 
calm before His murderers, I have a conception of what se- 
renity is. Brethren, revelation opens to us a scene beyond 
the grave when this shall be exhibited in full operation. 
There will be an everlasting banishment from God's presence 
of that impurity on which the last efforts have been tried in 
vain. It will be a carrying out of this sentence by a law 
that can not be reversed — "Depart from me, ye cursed." 
But it is quite a mistake to suppose that this is only a mat- 
ter of revelation Traces of it we have now on this side the 
sepulchre. Human life is full of God's recoil from sin. In 
the writhings of a heart which has been made to possess its 
own iniquities — in the dark spot which guilt leaves upon the 
conscience, rising up at times in a man's gayest moments, as 
if it will not come out — in the restlessness and the feverish- 
ness which follow the efforts of the man who has indulged 
habits of sin too long — in all these there is a law repelling 
wickedness from the presence of the Most High — which pro- 
claims that God is holy. 

Brethren, it is in these that the greatness of God consists 
— eternal in time — unlimited in space — unchangeable — pure 
in character — His serenity and His vastness arise from Hia 
own perfections. 



Mans Greatness and God's Greatness. 593 

n. We are to consider, in the second place, the greatness 
of man. 

1. The nature of that greatness. 

2. The persons who are great. 

Now, this is brought before us in the text in this one fact, 
that man has been made a habitation of the Deity — " I dwell 
with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit." There is 
in the very outset this distinction between what is great in 
God and w^hat is great in man. To be independent of every 
thing in the universe is God's glory, and to be independent 
is man's shame. All that God has. He has from Himself — 
all that man has, he has from God. And the moment man 
cuts himself off from God, that moment he cuts himself off 
from all true grandeur. 

There are two things implied in Scripture, when it is said 
that God dwells with man. The first is that peculiar pres- 
ence which He has conferred upon the members of His church. 
Brethren, we presume not to define what that Presence is, 
and how it dwells within us — we are content to leave it as a 
mystery. But this we know, that something of a very pecu- 
liar and supernatural character takes place in the heart of 
every man upon whom the Gospel has been brought to bear 
w4th power. " Know ye not," says the apostle, " that your 
bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost ?" And again, in 
the Epistle to the Ephesians — " In Christ ye are builded for 
a habitation of God through the Spirit." There is something 
in these expressions which refuses to be explained away. 
They leave us but one conclusion, and that is — that in all 
those who have become Christ's by faith, God personally and 
locally has taken up His dwelling-place. 

There is a second meaning attached in Scripture to the ex- 
pression, God dwells in man. According to the first mean- 
ing, w^e understand it in the most plain and literal sense the 
words are capable of conveying. According to the second, 
we understand His dwelling in a figurative sense, implying 
this — that He gives an acquaintance with Himself to man. 
So, for instance, Avhen Judas asked, "Lord, how is it, that 
Thou wilt manifest Thyself to us and not to the world ?" 
our Redeemer's reply was this — " If a man love me he will 
keep my words, and my Father w411 love him, and we will 
come uuto him and make our abode with him." In the 
question it was asked how God would manifest Himself to 
His servants. In the answer it was shown how He would 
make His abode with them. And if the answer be any reply 
to the question at all, what follows is this — that God making 
His abode or dwelling in the lieart is the same thmg t^xactly 
as God's manifesting himself to the heart. 



594 Mans Greatness and God's Greatness, 

Brethren, in these two things the greatness of man con- 
sists. One is to have God so dwelling in us as to impart His 
character to us ; and the other is to have God so dwelling in 
us that we recognize His presence, and know that we are 
His and He is ours. They are two things perfectly distinct. 
To have God in us, this is salvation ; to know that God is in 
us, this is assurance. 

Lastly, we inquire as to the persons who are truly great. 
And these the Holy Scripture has divided into two classes 
— those who are humble and those who are contrite in 
heart. Or rather, it will be observed that it is the same class 
of character under different circumstances. Humbleness is 
the frame of mind of those who are in a state of innocence, 
contrition of those who are in a state of repentant guilt. 
Brethren, let not the expression innocence be misunderstood. 
Innocence in its true and highest sense never existed but 
once upon this earth. Innocence can not be the religion of 
man now. But yet there are those who have walked with 
God from youth, not quenching the Spirit which He gave 
them, and who are therefore comparatively innocent beings. 
All they have to do is to go on, whereas the guilty man has 
to stop and turn back before he can go on. Repentance with 
them is the gentle work of every day, not the work of one 
distinct and miserable part of life. They are those whom 
the Lord calls just men which need no repentance, and of 
whom He says, " He that is clean needeth not save to wash 
his feet." 

Now they are described here as the humble in heart. 
Two things are required for this state of mind. One is that 
a man should have a true estimate of God, and the other is 
that he should have a true estimate of himself 

Vain, blind man, places himself on a little corner of this 
planet, a speck upon a speck of the universe, and begins to 
form conclusions from the small fraction of God's govern- 
ment which he can see from thence. The astronomer looks 
at the laws of motion, and forgets that there must have been 
a First Cause to commence that motion. The surgeon looks 
at the materialism of his own frame, and forgets that matter 
can not organize itself into exquisite beauty. The meta- 
physician buries himself in the laws of mind, and forgets that 
there may be spiritual influences producing all those laws. 
And this, brethren, is the unhumbled spirit of philosophy — 
intellectual pride. Men look at Xature, but they do not 
look through it up to Nature's God. There is awful igno- 
rance of God, arising from indulged sin, which produces an 
unhumbled heart. God may be shut out from the soul by 
pride of intellect or by pride of heart. 



Mans Greatness and God's Greatness, 595 

Pharaoh is placed before us in Scripture almost as a type 
of pride. His pride arose from ignorance of God. " Who is 
the Lord that I should obey his voice ? I know not the Lord, 
neither will I let Israel go." And this was not intellectual 
pride ; it was pride in a matter of duty. Pharaoh had been 
immersing his whole heart in the narrow politics of Egypt. 
The great problem of his day was to aggrandize his own 
people and prevent an insurrection of the Israelites ; and that 
small kingdom of Egypt had been his universe. He shut his 
heart to the voice of justice and the voice of humanity : in 
other words, great in the pride of human majesty, small in 
the sight of the high and lofty One, he shut himself out 
from the knowledge of God. 

The next ingredient of humbleness is, that a man must 
have a right estimate of himself There is a vast amount of 
self-deception on this point. We say of ourselves that which 
we could not bear others to say of us. A man truly humbled 
would take it only as his due when others treated him in the 
way that he says that he deserves. But, my brethren, we 
kneel in our closets in shame for what we are, and we tell 
our God that the lowest place is too good for us : and then 
we go into the world, and if we meet with slight or disre- 
spect, or if our opinion be not attended to, or if another be 
preferred before us, there is all the anguish of a galled and- 
jealous spirit, and half the bitterness of our lives comes from 
this, that we are smarting from what we call the wrongs and 
the neglect of men. My beloved brethren, if we saw ourselves 
as God sees us, we should be willing to be anywhere, to be si- 
lent when others speak, to be passed by in the world's crowd, 
and thrust aside to make way for others. We should be wil- 
ling to put others in the way of doing that which we might 
have got reputation for by doing ourselves. This was the 
temper of our Master — this is the meek and the quiet spirit, 
and this is the temper of the humble with whom the high 
and lofty One dwells. 

The other class of those who are truly great are the con- 
trite in spirit. At first sight it might be supposed that 
there must ever be a vast distinction between the innocent 
and the penitent. It was so that the elder son in the parable 
thought when he saw his brother restored to his father's 
favor. He was surprised and hurt. He had served his fa- 
ther these many years — his brother had wasted his substance 
in riotous living. But in this passage God makes no distinc- 
tion. He places the humble consistent follower and the 
broken-hearted sinner on a level. He dwells with both — with 
him that is contrite, and with him that is humble. He sheds 



59^ Mans Greatness and God's Greatness. 

around them both the grandeur of His own presence, and the 
annals of Church history are full of exemplifications of this 
marvel of God's grace. By the transforming grace of Christ, 
men, who have done the very work of Satan, have become as 
conspicuous in the service of Heaven as they were once con- 
spicuous in the career of guilt. 

So indisputably has this been so, that men have drawn 
from such instances the perverted conclusion, that if a man 
is ever to be a great saint, he must first be a great sinner. 
God forbid, brethren, that we should ever make such an in- 
ference. But this we infer for our own encouragement, that 
past sin does not necessarily preclude from high attainments. 
We must " forget the things that are behind." We must 
not mourn over past years of folly as if they made saintliness 
impossible. Deep as we may have been in earthliness, so 
deep we may also be in penitence, and so high we may be- 
come in spirituality. 

We have so many years the fewer to do our work in. 
Well, brethren, let us try to do it so much the faster. Christ 
can crowd the work of years into hours. He did it with the 
dying thief. If the man who has set out early may take his 
time, it certainly can not be so with us who have lost our 
time. If we have lost God's bright and happy presence by 
our willfulness, what then ? Unrelieved sadness ? Nay, breth- 
ren, calmness, purity, may have gone from our heart ; but all 
is not gone yet. Just as sweetness comes from the bark of 
the cinnamon when it is bruised, so can the spirit of the cross 
of Christ bring beauty and holiness and peace out of the 
bruised and broken heart. God dwells with the contrite as 
much as with the humble. 

And now, brethren, to conclude, the first inference we col- 
lect from this subject is the danger of coming into collision 
with such a God as our God. Day by day we commit sins 
of thought and word of which the dull eye of man takes no 
cognizance. He whose name is Holy can not pass them by. 
We may elude the vigilance of a human enemy and place 
ourselves beyond his reach. God fills all space- — there is not 
a spot in which His piercing eye is not on us, and His uplift- 
ed hand can not find us out. Man must strike soon if he 
would strike at all; for opportunities pass away from him, 
and his victim may escape his vengeance b}^ death. There 
is no passing of opportunity with God, and it is this which 
makes His long-suffering a solemn thing, God can wait, 
for He has a whole eternity before Him in which He may 
strike. "All things are open and naked to Him with whom 
we have to do." 



Ma7is Greatness and God's Greahiess. 597 

In the next place, we are taught the heavenly character 
of condescension. It is not from the insignificance of man 
that God's dwelling with him is so strange. It is as much 
the glory of God to bend His attention on an atom as to 
uphold the universe. But the marvel is that the habitation 
which He has chosen for Himself is an impure one. And 
when He came down from His magnificence to make this 
world His home, still the same character of condescension 
was shown through all the life of Christ. Our God selected 
the society of the outcasts of earth, those whom none else 
would speak tOc 

Brethren, if we would be Godlike, we must follow in the 
same steps. Our temptation is to do exactly the reverse. 
We are forever wishing to obtain the friendship and the in- 
timacy of those above us in the world. To win over men 
of influence to truth — to associate with men of talent and 
station and title. This is the world-chase, and this, breth- 
ren, is too much the religious man's chase. But if you look 
simply to the question of resemblance to God, then the man 
who makes it a habit to select that one in life to do good to, 
and that one m a room to speak with, whom others pass by 
because there is nothing either of intellect, or power, or name, 
to recommend him, but only humbleness, tJiat man has 
stamped upon his heart more of heavenly similitude by con- 
descension, than the man who has made it his business to 
win this world's great ones, even for the sake of truth. 

Lastly, we learn the guilt of two things of which this 
world is full — vanity and pride. There is a distinction 
between these two. But the distinction consists in this, 
that the vain man looks for the admiration of others — the 
proud man requires nothing but his own. Xow, it is this 
distinction which makes vanity despicable to us all. We 
can easily find out the vain man — we soon discover what it 
is he wants to be observed, whether it be a gift of person, or 
a gift of mind, or a gift of character. If he be vain of his 
person, his attitudes will tell the tale. If he be vain of his 
judgment, or his memory, or his honesty, he can not help an 
unnecessary parade. The world finds him out, and this is 
why vanity is ever looked on with contempt. So soon as we 
let men see that we are suppliants for their admiration, we 
are at their mercy. We have given them the privilege of 
feeling that they are above us. We have invited them to 
Bpurn us. And therefore vanity is but a thing for scorn. 
But it is very different with pride. Xo man can look down 
on him that is proud, for he has asked no man for any thing. 
They are forced to feel respect for pride, because it is thor* 



598 The Lawful and Unlawful Use of Law. 

oughly independent of them. It wraps itself up in the con- 
sequence of its own excellences, and scorns to care whether 
others take note of them or not. 

It is just here that the danger lies. We have exalted a 
Bin into a virtue. No man will acknowledge that he is vain, 
but almost any man will acknowledge that he is proud. But 
tried by the balance of the sanctuary, there is little to 
choose between the two. If a man look for greatness out 
of God, it matters little whether he seek it in his own 
applause or in the applause of others. The proud Pharisee, 
who trusted in himself that he was righteous, was condemned 
by Christ as severely, and even more, than the vain Jews 
who " could not believe because they sought honor from one 
another, and not that honor which cometh from God only." 
It may be a more dazzling and a more splendid sin to be 
proud. It is not less hateful in God's sight. Let us speak 
God's word to our own unquiet, swelling, burning hearts. 
Pride may disguise itself as it will in its own majesty, but in 
the presence of the high and lofty One, it is but littleness 
after all. 



XIX. 
THE LAWFUL AISTD UNLAWFUL USE OF LAW. 

A FRAGMENT. 

*' But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully." — 1 Tim. i. 8. 

It is scarcely ever possible to understand a passage with- 
out some acquaintance with the history of the circumstances 
under which it was written. 

At Ephesus, over which Timothy was bishop, people had 
been bewildered by the teaching of converted Jews, who 
mixed the old leaven of Judaism with the new spirituality of 
Christianity. They maintained the perpetual obligation of 
the Jewish law (ver. 7). They desired to be teachers of the 
law. They required strict performance of a number of 
severe observances. They talked mysteriously of angels 
and powers intermediate between God and the human soul 
(ver. 4). The result was an interminable discussion at 
Ephesus. The Church was filled with disputations and con- 
troversies. 

Now there is something always refreshing to see the 
Apostle Paul descending upon an arena of controversy, whera 



The Lawful aiid U^ilawful Use of Law, 599 

minds have been bewildered : and so much is to be said on 
both sides that people are uncertain which to take. You 
know at once that he will pour light upon the question, and 
illuminate all the dark corners. You know that he will not 
trim, and balance, and hang doubtful, or become a partisan ; 
but that he will seize some great principle which lies at the 
root of the whole controversy, and make its true bearings 
clear at once. 

This he always does, and this he does on the present occa- 
sion (ver. 5 and 6). He does not, like a vehement polemic, 
say Jewish ceremonies and rules are all worthless, nor some 
ceremonies are worthless and others essential ; but he says, 
the root of the whole matter is charity. If you turn aside 
from this, all is lost ; here at once the controversy closes. 
So far as any rule fosters the spirit of love, that is, is used 
lawfully, it is wise, and has a use. So far as it does not, it is 
chaif. So far as it hinders it, it is poison. 

Xow observe how different this method is from that which 
is called the sober, moderate way — the via media. Some 
would have said, the great thing is to avoid extremes. If 
the question respects fasting, fast, only in moderation : if 
the observance of the sabbath-day, observe it on the Jewish 
principle, only not so strictly. 

St. Paul, on the contrary, went down to the root ; he said. 
The true question is not whether the law is good or bad, but 
on what principle ; he said. You are both wrong — you^ in 
saying that the observance of the law is essential, for the 
end of it is charity, and if that be got, what matter how ; 
you^ in saying rules may be dispensed with entirely and al- 
ways, " for we know that the law is good." 

I. The unlawful use, and 
II. The lawful use of law. 

I. The unlawful use. 

Define law. By law, Paul almost always means, not the 
Mosaic law, but law in its essence and principle, that is, con- 
straint. This chiefly in two forms expresses itself — 1st. a 
custom ; 2d. a maxim. As examples of custom, we might 
give circumcision, or the sabbath, or sacrifice, or fasting. 

Law said, Thou shalt do these things ; and law, as mere 
law, constrained them. Or again, law may express itself in 
maxims and rules. 

In rules, as when law said, " Thou shalt not steal " — not 
saying a word about secret dishonesty of heart, but simply 
taking cognizance of acts. 

in maxims, as when it admonished that man ought to give 



6oo The Lawful and Unlawful Use of Law, 

a tenth to God, leaving the principle of the matter untoucii 
ed. Principle is one thing, and maxim is another. A prin- 
ciple requires liberality, a maxim says one-tenth. A princi- 
ple says, "A merciful man is merciful to his beast," leaves 
mercy to the heart, and does not define how ; a maxim says, 
" Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out thy corn.'* 
A principle says, " Forgive ;" a maxim defines " seven 
times ;" and thus the whole law falls into two divisions : 

The ceremonial law, which constrains life by customs. 

The moral law, which guides life by rules and maxims. 

Now it is an illegitimate use of law. First. To expect, 
by obedience to it, to make out a title to salvation. 

By the deeds of the law shall no man living be justified. 
Salvation is by faith : a state of heart right with God ; faith 
is the spring of holiness — a well of life. Salvation is not the 
having committed a certain number of good acts. Destruc- 
tion is not the having committed a certain number of crimes. 
Salvation is God's Spirit in us, leading to good. Destruction 
is the selfish spirit in us, leading to wrong. 

For a plain reason, then, obedience to law can not save, 
because it is merely the performance of a certain number of 
acts which may be done by habit, from fear, from compul- 
sion. Obedience remains still imperfect. A man may have 
obeyed the rule, and kept the maxim, and yet not be perfect. 
" All these commandments have I kept from mj^ youth up." 
" Yet lackest thou one thing." The law he had kept. The 
spirit of obedience in its high form of sacrifice he had not. 

Secondly. To use it superstitiously. 

It is plain that this was the use made of it by the Ephe- 
sian teachers (ver. 4). It seemed to them that law was 
pleasing to God as restraint. Then unnatural restraints 
came to be imposed — on the appetites, fasting ; on the affec- 
tions, celibacy. This is what Paul condemns (ch. iv., ver. 8) : 
" Bodily exercise profiteth little." 

And again, this superstition showed itself in a false rever- 
ence — wondrous stories respecting angels — respecting the 
eternal genealogy of Christ — awful thoughts about spirits. 
The apostle calls all these, very unceremoniously, " end- 
less genealogies" (ver. 4), and "old wives' fables" (ch. iv., 
ver. 7). 

The question at issue is, wherein true reverence consists : 
according to them, in the multiplicity of the objects of rever- 
ence ; according to St. Paul, in the character of the object 
revered God and right the true object. 

But you are not a whit the better for solemn and reveren- 
tial feelings about a mysterious, invisible world. To trem- 



The Laivful and Unlaw fid Use of Law. 601 

ble before a consecrated wafer is spurious reverence. To 
bend before the majesty of right is Christian reverence. 

Thirdly. To use it as if the letter of it were sacred. The 
law commanded none to eat the shew-bread except the 
priests. David ate it in hunger. If Abimelech had scrupled 
to give it he would have used the law unlawfullj^ 

The law commanded no manner of work. The apostles in 
hunger rubbed the ears of corn. The Pharisees used the 
law unlawfully, in forbidding that. 

n. The lawful use of law. 

1. As a restraint to keep outward evil in check 

* The law was made for sinners and profane." .... Illus- 
trate this by reference to capital punishment. No sane man 
believes that punishment by death will make a nation's 
heart right, or that the sight of an execution can soften or 
ameliorate. Punishment does not work in that way. It is 
not meant for that purpose. It is meant to guard society. 

The law commanding a blasphemer to be stoned could not 
teach one Israelite love to God, but it could save the streets 
of Israel from scandalous ribaldry. 

And therefore, clearly understood, law is a mere check to 
bad men : it does not improve them ; it often makes them 
worse ; it can not sanctify them. God never intended that 
it should. It saves society from the open transgression ; it 
does not contemplate the amelioration of the offender. 

Hence we see for what reason the apostle insisted on the 
use of the law for Christians. Law never can be abrogated. 
Strict rules are needed exactly in proportion as we want the 
power or the will to rule ourselves. It is not because the 
Gospel has come that we are free from the law, but because, 
and only so far, as we are in a Gospel state. " It is for a 
righteous man" that the law is not made, and thus we see 
the true nature of Christian liberty. The liberty to which 
we are called in Christ is not the liberty of devils, the liberty 
of doing what we will, but the blessed liberty of being on 
the side of the law, and therefore unrestrained by it in do- 
ing right. 

Illustrate from laws of coining, housebreaking, etc. We 
are not under them ; because we may break them as we like ? 
Nay, the moment we desire, the law is alive again to us. 

2. As a primer is used by a child to acquire by degrees, 
principles and a spirit. 

This is the use attributed to it in verse 5 : " The end of 
the commandment is charity." 

Compare with this two other passages—" Christ is the end 



6o2 The Lawful and Unlawful Use of Law, 

of the law for righteousness," and " Love is the fulfilling of 
the law ;" " Perfect love casteth out fear." 

In every law there is a spirit ; in every maxim a principle ; 
and the law and the maxim are laid down for the sake of con- 
serving the spirit and the principle which they enshrine. 

St. Paul compares God's dealing with man to a wise pa 
rent's instruction of his child — see the Epistle to the Gala 
tians. Boyhood is under law ; you appeal not to the boy's 
reason, but his will, by rewards and punishments : Do this, 
and I will reward you ; do it not, and you will be punished. 
So long a& a man is under law this is salutary and necessary, 
but only while under law. He is free w^hen he discerns prin- 
ciples, and at the same time has got, by habit, the will to 
obey. So that rules have done for him a double work^ taught 
him the principle and facilitated obedience to it. 

Distinguish, however. In point of time, law is first — in 
point of importance, the Spirit. 

In point of tirtie^ charity is the " end " of the commandment 
— in point of importance^ first and foremost. 

The first thing a boy has to do is to learn implicit obedi- 
ence to rules. The first thing in importance for a man to 
learn is, to sever himself from maxims, rules, laws. Why ? 
That he may become an Antinomian, or a Latitudinarian ? 
Ko. He is severed from submission to the maxim because 
he has got allegiance to the principle. He is free from the 
rule and the law because he has got the Spirit written in his 
heart. 

This is the Gospel. A man is redeemed by Christ so far 
as he is not under the law ; he is free from the law so faf 
as he is free from the evil which the law restrains ; he 
progresses so far as there is no evil in him which it is 
an effort to keep down ; and perfect salvation and liberty 
are when we — who, though having the first-fruits of the 
Spirit, yet groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, 
" to wit, the redemption of our body " — shall have been 
freed in body, soul, and spirit, from the last traces of the 
evil which can only be kept down by force. In other words, 
80 far as Christ's statement is true of ws, " The Prince of thia 
world Cometh, and hath nothing in me." 



The Prodigal and his Brother, 603 



THE PRODIGAL AND HIS BROTHER. 

" And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is 
thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad : for this thy 
bi other was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found." — Luke 
XV. 31, 32. 

There are two classes of sins. There are some sins by which 
man crushes, wounds, malevolently injures his brother man ^ 
those sins which speak of a bad, tyrannical, and selfish heart. 
Christ met those with denunciation. There are other sins by 
which a man injures himself There is a life of reckless in- 
dulgence ; there is a career of yielding to ungovernable pro- 
pensities, which most surely conducts to wretchedness and 
ruin, but makes a man an object of compassion rather than 
of condemnation. 

The reception which sinners of this class met from Christ 
was marked by strange and pitying mercy. There was no 
maudlin sentiment on His lips. He called sin sin, and guilt 
guilt. But yet there were sins which His lips scourged, and 
others over which, containing in themselves their own 
scourge. His heart bled. That which was melancholy, and 
marred, and miserable in this world, was more congenial to 
the heart of Christ than that which was proudly happy. It 
was in the midst of a triumph, and all the pride of a proces- 
sion, that He paused to weep over ruined Jerusalem. And if 
we ask the reason why the character of Christ was marked by 
this melancholy condescension, it is that He was in the midst 
of a world of ruins, and there was nothing there to gladden, 
but very much to touch with grief He was here to restore 
that which was broken down and crumbling into decay. An 
enthusiastic antiquarian, standing amidst the fragments of 
an ancient temple surrounded by dust and moss, broken pil- 
lar and defaced architrave, with magnificent projects in his 
mind of restoring all this to former majesty, to draw out to 
light from mere rubbish the ruined glories, and therefore 
stooping down amongst the dank ivy and the rank nettles ; 
such was Christ amidst the wreck of human nature. He was 
striving to lift it out of its degradation. He was searching 
out in revolting places that which had fallen down, that Ha 
might build it up again in fair proportions, a holy temple to 
the Lord. 



6o4 The Prodigal and his Brother. 

Therefore He labored among the guilty ; therefore He was 
^he companion of outcasts ; therefore He spoke tenderly and 
lovingly to those whom society counted undone ; therefore He 
loved to bind up the bruised and the broken-hearted ; therefore 
His breath fanned the spark which seemed dying out in the 
wick of the expiring taper, when men thought that it was too 
late, and that the hour of hopeless profligacy was come. It 
was that feature in His character, that tender, hoping, en- 
couraging spirit of His which the prophet Isaiah fixed upon 
as a characteristic. " A bruised reed will He not break." 

It was an illustration of this spirit which He gave in the 
parable which forms the subject of our consideration to-day. 
We find the occasion which drew it from Him in the com- 
mencement of this chapter, " Then drew near unto Him all 
the publicans and sinners for to hear Him. And the Phari- 
sees and Scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sin- 
ners and eateth with them." It was then that Christ con- 
descended to ofier an excuse or an explanation of his conduct. 
And His excuse was this : It is natural, humanly natural, to 
rejoice more over that which has been recovered than over 
that which has been never lost. He proved that by three 
illustrations taken from human life. The first illustration in- 
tended to show the feelings of Christ in winning back a sin- 
ner, was the joy which the shepherd feels in the recovery of 
a sheep from the mountain wilderness. The second was the 
satisfaction which a person feels for a recovered coin. The 
last was the gladness which attends the restoration of an 
erring son. 

Now the three parables are alike in this, that they all 
describe more or less vividly the feelings of the Redeemer 
on the recovery of the lost. But the third parable differs 
from the other two in this, that besides the feelings of the 
Saviour, it gives us a multitude of particulars respecting the 
feelings, the steps, and the motives of the penitent who is 
reclaimed back to goodness. In the first two the thing lost 
is a coin or a sheep. It would not be possible to find any 
picture of remorse or gladness there. But in the third para- 
ble the thing lost is not a lifeless thing, nor a mute thing, 
but a being, the workings of whose human heart are all de- 
scribed. So that the subject opened out to us is a more ex- 
tensive one — not merely the feelings of the finder, God in 
Christ, but besides that, the sensations of the wanderer him- 
self. 

In dealing with this parable, this is the line which we 
ihall adopt. We shall look at the picture which it draws of 
^1. God's treatment of the penitent. 2. God's expostulation 



The Prodigal and his Brother, 605 

with the saint. God's treatment of the penitent divides it- 
self in this parable into three distinct epochs. The period 
of alienation, the period of repentance, and the circumstances 
of a penitent reception. We shall consider all these in turn. 

The first truth exhibited in this parable is the alienation 
of man's heart from God. Homelessness, distance from our 
Father — that is man's state by nature in this world. The 
youngest son gathered all together and took his journey into 
2, far country. Brethren, this is the history of worldliness. 
It is a state far from God ; in other words, it is a state of 
homelessness. And now let us ask what that means. To 
English hearts it is not necessary to expound elaborately the 
infinite meanings which cluster round that blessed expres- 
sion, " home." Home is the one place in all this world 
where hearts are sure of each other. It is the place of con- 
fidence. It is the place where we tear off that mask of 
guarded and suspicious coldness which the world forces us 
to wear in self-defense, and where we pour out the unre- 
served communications of full and confiding hearts. It is 
the spot where expressions of tenderness gush out without 
any sensation of awkwardness and without any dread of 
ridicule. Let a man travel where he will, home is the place 
to which "his heart untravelled fondly turns." He is to 
double all pleasure there. He is there to divide all pain. A 
happy home is the single spot of rest which a man has upon 
this earth for the cultivation of his noblest sensibilities. 

And now, my brethren, if that be the description of home, 
is God's place of rest your home ? Walk abroad and alone 
by night. That awful other world in the stillness and the 
solemn deep of the eternities above, is it your home ? Those 
graves that lie beneath you, holding in them the infinite se- 
cret, and stamping upon all earthly loveliness the mark of 
frailty and change and fleetingness — are those graves thi 
prospect to which in bright days and dark days you can 
turn without dismay ? God in his splendors — dare we feel 
with Him affectionate and familiar, so that trial comes soft- 
ened by this feeling — it is my Father, and enjoyment can be 
taken with a frank feeling ; my Father has given it me, with- 
out grudging, to make me happy ? All that is having a 
home in God. Are we at home there ? Why, there is dem- 
onstration in our very childhood that we are not at home 
with that other world of God's. An infant fears to be alone, 
because he feels he is not alone. He trembles in the dark, 
because he is conscious of the presence of the world of spirits. 
Long before he has been told tales of terror, there is an in- 
stinctive dread of the supernatural in the infant mind. It ia 



6o6 The Prodigal and his Brother, 

the instinct which we have from childhood that gives us the 
feeling of another world. And mark, brethren, if the child 
is not at home in the thought of that world of Grod's, the 
deep of darkness and eternity is around him — God's home, 
but not his home, for his flesh creeps. And that feeling 
grows through life; not the fear — when the child becomes a 
man he gets over fear — but the dislike. The man feels as 
much aversion as the child for the world of spirits. 

Sunday comes. It breaks across the current of his world- 
liness. It suggests thoughts of death and judgment and 
everlasting existence. Is that home ? Can the worldly man 
feel Sunday like a foretaste of his Father's mansion ? If we 
could but know how many have come here to-day, not to 
have their souls lifted up heavenward, but from curiosity, or 
idleness, or criticism, it would give us an appalling estimate 
of the number who are living in a far country, " having no 
hope, and without God in the world." 

The second truth conveyed to us in this parable is the un- 
satisfying nature of worldly happiness. The outcast son 
tried to satiate his appetite with husks. A husk is an empty 
thing; it is a thing which looks extremely like food, and 
promises as much as food ; but it is not food. It is a thing 
which when chewed will stay the appetite, but leaves the 
emaciated body without nourishment. Earthly happiness is 
a husk. We say not that there is no satisfaction in the pleas- 
ures of a worldly life. That would be an over-statement of 
the truth. Something there is, or else why should men per- 
sist in living for them ? The cravings of man's appetite may 
be stayed by things which can not satisfy him. Every new 
pursuit contains in it a new hope ; and it is long before hope 
is bankrupt. But, my brethren, it is strange if a man has not 
found out, long before he has reached the age of thirty, that 
every thing here is empty and disappointing. The nobler 
his heart and the more unquenchable his hunger for the high 
and the good, the sooner will he find that out. Bubble after 
bubble bursts, each bubble tinted with the celestial colors of 
the rainbow, and each leaving in the hand which crushes it 
a cold damp drop of disappointment. All that is described 
in Scripture by the emphatic metaphor of" sowing the wind 
and reaping the whirlwind," the whirlwind of blighted hopes 
and unreturned feelings and crushed expectations — that is 
the harvest which the world gives you to reap. 

And now is the question asked. Why is this world unsatis- 
fying ? Brethren, it is the grandeur of the soul which God 
has given us, which makes it insatiable in its desires — with 
an infinite void which can not be filled up. A soul which 



The Prodigal and his Brother, 607 

vras made for God, how can the world fill it ? If the oceao 
can be still with miles of unstable waters beneath it, then 
the soul of man, rocking itself upon its own deep longings, 
with the Infinite beneath it, may rest. We w^ere created 
once in majesty, to find enjoyment in God, and if our hearts 
are empty now, there is nothing for it but to fill up the hol- 
lowness of the soul with God. 

Let not that expression — filling the soul with God — pass 
away without a distinct meaning. God is love and good- 
ness. Fill the soul with goodness, and fill the soul with 
love, that is the filling it with God. If we love one another, 
God dwelleth in us. There is nothing else that can satisfy. 
So that when we hear men of this world acknowledge, as 
they sometimes will do, when they are wearied with this 
phantom chase of life, sick of gayeties and tired of toil, that 
it is not in their pursuits that they can drink the fount of 
blessedness ; and when we see them, instead of turning aside 
either broken-hearted or else made wise, still persisting to 
trust to expectations — at fifty, sixty, or seventy years, still 
feverish about some new plan of ambition — what we see is 
this : we see a soul formed with a capacity for high and no- 
ble things, fit for the banquet-table of God Himself, trying 
to fill its infinite hollowness with husks. 

Once more : there is degradation in the life of irreligion. 
The things which the wanderer tried to live on were not 
husks only. They were husks which the swine did eat. 
Degradation means the application of a thing to purposes 
lower than that for which it was intended. It is degrada- 
tion to a man to live on husks, because these are not his true 
foodo We call it degradation when we see the members of 
an ancient family, decayed by extravagance, w^orking foi 
their bread. It is not degradation for a born laborer ta 
work for an honest livelihood. It is degradation for them, 
for they are not what they might have been. And there- 
fore, for a man to be degraded, it is not necessary that he 
should have given himself up to low and mean practices. 
It is quite enough that he is living for purposes lower 
than those for which God intended him. He may be a man 
of unblemished reputation, and yet debased in the truest 
meaning of the word. We were sent into this world to love 
God and to love man ; to do good — to fill up life with deeds 
of generosity and usefulness. And he that refuses to work 
out that high destiny is a degraded man. He may turn 
away revolted from every thing that is gross. His sensuous 
indulgences may be all marked by refinement and taste. 
His house may be filled with elegance. His library may be 



6o8 The Prodigal and his Brother 

adorned with books. There may be the sounds in his man- 
sion which can regale the ear, the delicacies which can stim- 
ulate the palate, and the forms of beauty which can please 
the eye. There may be nothing in his whole life to oifend 
the most chastened and fastidious delicacy ; and yet, if the 
history of all this be, powers which were meant for eternity 
frittered upon time, the man is degraded — if the spirit which 
was created to find its enjoyment in the love of God has set- 
jtled down satisfied with the love of the world, then, just as 
surely as the sensualist of this parable, that man has turned 
aside from a celestial feast to prey on garbage. 

We pass on to the second period of the history of God's 
treatment of a sinner. It is the period of his coming to him- 
self, or what we call repentance. The first fact of religious 
experience which this parable suggests to us is that common 
truth — men desert the world when the world deserts them. 
The renegade came to himself when there were no more 
husks to eat. He would have remained away if he could 
have got them, but it is written, " no man gave unto him." 
And this, brethren, is the record of our shame. Invitation 
is not enough ; we must be driven to God. And the famine 
comes not by chance. God sends the famine into the soul — 
the hunger, and thirst, and the disappointment — to bring 
back his erring child again. 

I^^ow the world fastens upon that truth, and gets out of it 
a triumphant sarcasm against religion. They tell us that 
just as the caterpillar passes into the chrysalis, and the 
chrysalis into the butterfly, so profligacy passes into disgust, 
and disgust passes into religion. To use their own phraseol- 
ogy, when people become disappointed with the world it is 
the last resource, they say, to turn saint. So the men of the 
world speak, and they think they are profoundly philosophi- 
cal and concise in the account they give. The world is wel- 
come to its very small sneer. It is the glory of our Master's 
Gospel that it is the refuge of the broken-hearted. It is the 
strange mercy of our God that He does not reject the writh- 
ings of a jaded heart. Let the world curl its lip if it will, 
when it sees through the causes of the prodigal's return. 
And if the sinner does not come to God taught by this dis- 
appointment, what then ? If afiections crushed in early life 
have driven one man to God ; if wrecked and ruined hopes 
have made another man religious ; if want of success in a 
profession has broken the spirit ; if the human life lived out 
too passionately has left a surfeit and a craving behind 
which end in seriousness ; if one is brought by the sadness 
of widowed life, and another by the forced desolation of in* 



The Prodigal and his Brother, 609 

voluntary single life ; if when the mighty famine comes into 
the heart, and not a husk is left, not a pleasure untried, then, 
and not till then, the remorseful resolve is made, " I will 
arise and go to my Father :"— well, brethren, what then? 
Why this, that the history of penitence, produced as it so 
often is by mere disappointment, sheds only a brighter lustre 
round the love of Christ, who rejoices to receive such wan- 
derers, worthless as they are, back into His bosom. Thank 
God, the world's sneer is true. It is the last resource to turn 
saint. Thanks to our God that when this gaudy world has 
ceased to charm, when the heart begins to feel its hollow- 
ness, and the world has lost its satisfying power, still all is 
not yet lost, if penitence and Christ remain, to still, to hum- 
ble, and to soothe a heart which sin has fevered. 

There is another truth contained in this section of the 
parable. After a life of wild sinfulness, religion is servitude 
at first, not freedom. Observe, he went back to duty with 
the feelings of a slave : " I am no more worthy to be called 
thy eon ; make me as one of thy hired servants." Any one 
w^ho has lived in the excitement of the world, and then tried 
to settle down at once to quiet duty, knows how true that is. 
To borrow a metaphor from Israel's desert life, it is a tasteless 
thing to live on manna after you have been feasting upon 
quails. It is a dull cold drudgery to find pleasure in simple 
occupation when life has been a succession of strong emo- 
tions. Sonship it is not ; it is slavery. A son obeys in 
love, entering heartily into his father's meaning. A servant 
obeys mechanically, rising early because he must ; doing, it 
may be, his duty well, but feeling in all its force the irksome- 
ness of the service. Sonship does not come all at once. 
The yoke of Christ is easy, the burden of Christ is light ; 
but it is not light to every body. It is light when you love 
it, and no man who has sinned much can love it all at once. 

Therefore, if I speak to any one who is trying to be relig- 
ious, and heavy in heart because his duty is done too formal- 
ly, my Christian brother, fear not. You are returning, like 
the prodigal, with the feelings of a servant. Still it is a real 
return. The spirit of adoption will come afterwards. You 
will often have to do duties which you can not relish, and in 
which you see no meaning. So it was with Naaman at the 
prophet's command. He bathed, not knowing why he was 
bidden to bathe, in Jordan. When you bend to prayer, often 
and often you will have to kneel with wandering thoughts, 
and constraining lips to repeat words into which your heart 
scarcely enters. You will have to perform duties when the 
heart is cold, and without ^ spark of enthusiasm to warm 



6 1 o The Prodigal and his Brother, 

you. But, my Christian brother, onward still. Struggle to 
the cross, even thouoh it be struo^o-ling^ as in chains. Just 
as on a day of clouds, when you have watched the distant 
hills, dark and gray with mist, suddenly a gleam of sunshine 
passing over reveals to you, in that flat surface, valleys and 
dells and spots of sunny happiness, which slept before unsus- 
pected in the fog, so in the gloom of penitential life there 
will be times when God's deep peace and love will be felt 
shining into the soul with supernatural refreshment. Let the 
penitent be content with the servant's lot at first. Liberty 
and peace, and the bounding sensations of a Father's arms 
around you, come afterwards. 

The last circumstance in this division of our subject is the 
reception which a sinner meets with on his return to God. 
" Bring forth the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring 
on his hand, and shoes on his feet, and bring hither the fat- 
ted calf and kill it, and let us eat and be merry." This ban- 
quet represents to us two things. It tells of the father's glad- 
ness on his son's return. That represents God's joy on the 
reformation of a sinner. It tells of a banquet and a dance 
given to the long-lost son. That represents the sinner's 
gladness when he first understood that God was reconciled 
to him in Christ. There is a strange, almost wild, rapture, a 
strong gush of love and happiness in those days which are 
called the days of the first conversion. When a man who 
has sinned much — a profligate — turns to God, and it becomes 
first clear to his apprehension that there is love instead of 
spurning for him, there is a luxury of emotion — a banquet of 
tumultuous blessedness in the moment of first love to God, 
which stands alone in life, nothing before and nothing after 
like it. And, brethren, let us observe : This forgiveness is a 
thing granted while a man is yet afar ofi*. We are not to 
wait for the right of being happy till we are good : we might 
wait forever. Joy is not delayed till we deserve it. Just so 
soon as a sinful man trusts that the mercy of God in Christ 
has done away with his transgression, the ring, and the robe, 
and the shoes are his, the banquet and the light of a Father's 
countenance. 

Lastly, we have to consider very briefly God's expostula- 
tion with a saint. There is another brother mentioned in 
this parable, who expressed something like indignation at 
the treatment which his brother met with. There are com- 
mentators who have imagined that this personage represents 
the Pharisees who complained that Jesus was receiving sin- 
ners. But this is manifestly impossible, because his father 
expostulates with him in this language, "Son, thou art eveJ 



The Prodigal and his Brother. 6 1 1 

with me ;" not for one moment could that be true of the Phar- 
isees. The true interpretation seems to be that this elder 
brother represents a real Christian perplexed with God's 
mysterious dealings. We have before us the description of 
one of those happy persons who have been filled with the 
Holy Ghost from their mother's womb, and on the whole 
(with imperfections of course) remained God's servant all his 
life. For this is his own account of himself, which the father 
does not contradict. " Lo ! these many years do I serve 
thee." 

We observe, then, the objection made to the reception of 
a notorious sinner — "Thou never gavest me a kid." Now, 
in this w^e have a fact true to Christian experience. Joy 
seems to be felt more vividly and more exuberantly by men 
who have sinned much, than by men who have grown up 
consistently from childhood with religious education. Rap- 
ture belongs to him whose sins, which are forgiven, are 
many. In the perplexity which this fact occasions, there is 
a feeling which is partly right and partly wrong. There is a 
surprise which is natural. There is a resentful jealousy 
which is to be rebuked. 

There is first of all a natural surprise. It was natural that 
the elder brother should feel perplexed and hurt. When a 
sinner seems to be rewarded with more happiness than a 
saint, it appears as if good and evil w^ere alike undistinguish- 
ed in God's dealings. It seems like putting a reconciled en- 
emy over the head of a tried servant. It looks as if it were 
a kind of encouragement held out to sin, and a man begins 
to feel. Well, if this is to be the caprice of my father's deal- 
ing; if this rich feast of gladness be the reward of a licen- 
tious life, "Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and 
washed my hands in innocency." This is natural surprise. 

But besides this there is a jealousy in these sensations of 
ours which God sees fit to rebuke. You have been trying to 
serve God all your life, and find it struggle, and heaviness, 
and dullness still. You see another who has outraged every 
obligation of life, and he is not tried by the deep prostration 
you think he ought to have, but bright with happiness at 
once. You have been making sacrifices all your life, and 
your worst trials come out of your most generous sacrifices. 
Your errors in judgment have been followed by sufferings 
sharper than those which crime itself could have brought. 
And you see men who never made a sacrifice unexposed to 
trial — men whose life has been rapture purchased by the 
ruin of others' innocence — tasting first the pleasures of sin, 
and then the banquet of religion. You have been a moral 



(5 1 2 The Prodigal and his Brother. 

man from childhood, and yet with all your efforts you feel 
the crushing conviction that it has never once been granted 
you to win a soul to God. And you see another man mark- 
ed by inconsistency and impetuosity, banqueting every day 
upon the blest success of impressing and saving souls. All 
that is startling. And then comes sadness and despondency ; 
then come all those feelings which are so graphically depict- 
ed here : irritation — " he was angry ;" swelling pride — " he 
Vould not go in ;" jealousy, A^hich required soothing — " his 
father went out and entreated him." 

And now, brethren, mark the father's answer. It does not 
account for this strange dealing by God's sovereignty. It 
does not cut the knot of the difficulty, instead of untying it, 
by saying, God has a right to do what He will. He does not 
urge, God has a right to act on favoritism if He please. But 
it assigns two reasons. The first reason is, "It was mee?, 
right that we should make merry." It is meet that God 
should be glad on the reclamation of a sinner. It is meet 
that that sinner, looking down into the dreadful chasm over 
which he had been tottering, should feel a shudder of delight 
through all his frame on thinking of his escape. And it is 
meet that religious men should not feel jealous of one anoth- 
er, but freely and generously join in thanking God that 
others have got happiness, even if they have not. The spirit 
of religious exclusiveness, which looks down contemptuously 
instead of tenderly on worldly men, and banishes a man for- 
ever from the circle of its joys because he has sinned notori- 
ously, is a bad spirit. 

Lastly, the reason given for this dealing is, " Son, thou art 
always with me, and all that I have is thine." By which 
Christ seems to tell us that the disproportion between man 
and man is much less than we suppose. The profligate had 
had one hour of ecstasy — the other had had a whole life of 
peace. A consistent Christian may not have rapture ; but 
he has that which is much better than rapture : calmness — 
God's serene and perpetual presence. And after all, breth- 
ren, that is the best. One to whom much is forgiven has 
much joy. He must have it, if it were only to support him 
through those fearful trials which are to come — those haunt- 
ing reminiscences of a polluted heart — those frailties — those 
inconsistencies to which the habits of past indulgence have 
made him liable. A terrible struggle is in store for him yet. 
Grudge him not one hour of unclouded exultation. But re- 
ligion's best gift — rest, serenity — the quiet daily love of one 
who lives perpetually with his Father's family — uninterrupt- 
ed usefulness — that belongs to him who has lived steadily, 



The Prodigal and his Brother, 6 1 3 

and walked with duty, neither grieving nor insulting the 
Holy Spirit of his God. The man who serves God early has 
the best of it ; joy is well in its way, but a few flashes of joy 
are trifles in comparison with a life of peace. Which is best : 
the flash of joy lighting up the whole heart, and then dark- 
ness till the next flash comes — or the steady calm sunlight 
of day in which men work ? 

And now, one word to those who are living this young 
man's life — thinking to become religious, as he did, when 
they have got tired of the world. I speak to those who are 
leading what, in the world's softened language of conceal- 
ment, is called a gay life. Young brethren, let two motives 
be urged earnestly upon your attention. The first is the 
motive of mere honorable feeling. We will say nothing 
about the uncertainty of life. We will not dwell upon this 
fact, that impressions resisted now may never come back 
again. We will not appeal to terror. That is not the 
weapon which a Christian minister loves to use. If our lips 
were clothed with thunder, it is not denunciation which 
makes men Christians ; let the appeal be made to every 
high and generous feeling in a young man's bosom. 

Deliberately and calmly you are going to do this: to 
spend the best and most vigorous portion of your days in 
idleness, in uselessness, in the gratification of self, in the con- 
tamination of others. And then weakness, the relics and 
the miserable dregs of life — you are going to give that sor- 
ry ofiering to God, because His mercy endureth forever ! 
Shame — shame upon the heart which can let such a plan rest 
in it one moment. If it be there, crush it like a man. It is 
a degrading thing to enjoy husks till there is no man to give 
them. It is a base thing to resolve to give to God as little 
as possible, and not to serve Him till you must. 

Young brethren, I speak principally to you. You have 
health for God now. You have strength of mind and body. 
You have powers which may fit you for real usefulness. 
You have appetites for enjoyment which can be consecrated 
to God. You acknowledge the law of honor. Well, then, 
by every feeling of manliness and generosity remember this : 
now, and not later, is your time to learn what religion 
means. 

There is another motive, and a very solemn one, to be 
urged upon those who are delaying. Every moment of de- 
lay adds bitterness to after-struggles. The moment of a 
feeling of hired servitude must come. If a man will not 
obey God with a warm heart, he may hereafter have to do it 
with a cold one. To be holy is the work of a long life. The 



6 1 4 yohn 's Rebuke of Herod. 

experience often thousand lessons teaches only a little of it; 
and all this, the work of becoming like God, the man who 
delays is crowding into the space of a few years or a few 
months. When we have lived long a life of sin, do we think 
that repentance and forgiveness will obliterate all the traces 
of sin upon the character ? Be sure that every sin pays its 
price: "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." 
Oh! there are recollections of past sin which come crowd- 
ing up to the brain, with temptation in them. There are 
old habits which refuse to be mastered by a few enthusiastic 
sensations. There is so much of the old man clinging to the 
penitent who has waited long — he is so much, as a religious 
man, like what he was when he was a worldly man — that it 
is doubtful whether he ever reaches in this world the full 
stature of Christian manhood. Much warm earnestness, but 
strange inconsistencies — that is the character of one who is 
an old man and a young Christian. Brethren, do we wish to 
risk all this ? Do we want to learn holiness with terrible 
struggles, and sore affliction, and the plague of much re- 
maining evil ? Then wait before you turn to God. 



XXI. 
JOHN'S REBUKE OF HEROD. 

"But Herod the tetrarch, being reproved by him for Herodiashis brother 
Philip's wife, and for all the evils which Herod had done, added yet this 
above all, that he shut up John in prison." — Luke iii. 19, 20. 

The life of John the Baptist divides itself into three dis- 
tinct periods. Of the first we are told almost nothing, but 
we may conjecture much. We are told that he was in the 
deserts till his shov^^ing unto Israel. It was a period, proba- 
bly, in which, saddened by the hollowness of all life in Is- 
rael, and perplexed with the controversies of Jerusalem, the 
controversies of Sadducee with Pharisee, of formalist with 
mystic, of the disciples of one infallible rabbi with the disci- 
ples of another infallible rabbi, he fled for refuge to the wil- 
derness, to see whether God could not be found there by the 
heart that sought Him, without the aid of churches, rituals, 
creeds, and forms. This period lasted thirty years. 

The second period is a shorter one. It comprises the few 
months of his public ministry. His difficulties were over; 
he had reached conviction enough to live and die on. He 



John J Rebuke of Herod, 6 1 5 

knew not all, but he knew something. He could not baptize 
with the Spirit, but he could at least baptize with water. 
It was not given to him to build up, but it was given to him 
to pull down all false foundations. He knew that the high- 
est truth of spiritual life was to be given by One that should 
come after. What he had learned in the desert was con- 
tained in a few words — Reality lies at the root of religious 
life. Ye must be real, said John. " Bring forth fruits meet 
for repentance." Let each man do his own duty; let. the rich 
impart to those who are not rich; let the publican accuse 
no man falsely ; let the soldier be content with his wages. 
The coming kingdom is not a mere piece of machinery which 
will make you all good and happy without efibrt of your 
own. Change yourselves, or you will have no kingdom at 
all. Personal reformation, personal reality, that was John's 
message to the world. 

It was an incomplete one ; but he delivered it as his all, 
manfully; and his success was signal, astonishing even to 
himself. Successful it was, because it appealed to all the 
deepest wants of the human heart. It told of peace to those 
who had been agitated by tempestuous passion. It promised 
forgetfulness of past transgression to those whose consciences 
smarted with self-accusing recollections. It spoke of refuge 
from the wrath to come to those who had felt it a fearful 
expectation to fall into the hands of an angry God. And the 
result of that message, conveyed by the symbol of baptism, 
was that the desert swarmed with crowds who owned the 
attractive spell of the power of a new life made possible. 
Warriors, paupers, profligates — some admiring the nobleness 
of religious life, others needing it to fill up the empty hollow 
of an unsatisfied heart ; the penitent, the heart-broken, the 
worldly, and the disappointed, all came. And with them 
there came two other classes of men, whose approach roused 
the Baptist to astonishment. 

The formalist, not satisfied with his formality, and the 
infidel, unable to rest on his infidelity — they came too — 
startled, for one hour at least, to the real significance of life, 
and shaken out of unreality. The Baptist's message wrung 
the confession from their souls : " Yes, our system will not 
do. We are not happy, after all ; we are miserable. Proph- 
et, whose solitary life, far away there in the desert, has 
been making to itself a home in the mysterious and the in- 
visible, what hast thou got to tell us from that awful other 
world ? What are we to do ?" 

These things belong to a period of John's life anterior to 
the text. The prophet has been hitherto in a self-selected 



6 1 6 yohn V Rebuke of Herod, 

solitude, the free wild desert, opening his heart to the strange 
sights and sounds through which the grand voice of orient- 
al nature speaks of God to the soul, in a way that books can 
not speak. 

We have arrived at the third period of his history. We 
are now to consider him as the tenant of a compelled solitude, 
in the dungeon of a capricious tyrant. Hitherto, by that 
rugged energy with which he battled with the temptations 
of this world, he has been shedding a glory round human 
life. We are now to look at him equally alone; equally 
majestic, shedding by martyrdom almost a brighter glory 
round human death. He has hitherto been receiving the 
homage of almost unequalled popularity. We are now to 
observe him reft of every admirer, every soother, every friend. 
He has been hitherto overcoming the temptations of existence 
by entire seclusion from them all. We are now to ask how 
he will stem those seductions when he is brought into the 
very midst of them, and the whole outAvard aspect of his life 
has laid aside its distinctive and peculiar character ; when he 
has ceased to be the anchorite, and has become the idol of 
court. 

Much instruction, brethren, there ought to be in all this, 
if we only knew rightly how to bring it out, or even to paint 
in any thing like intelligible colors the picture which our 
own minds have formed. Instructive, because human life 
must ever be instructive. How a human spirit contrived to 
get its life accomplished in this confused world : what a man 
like us, and yet no common man, felt, did, suffered ; how he 
fought, and how he conquered ; if we could only get a clear 
possession and firm grasp of that^ we should have got almost 
all that is worth having in truth, with the technicalities 
stripped off, for what is the use of truth except to teach man 
how to live ? There is a vast value in genuine biography. It 
is good to have real views of what life is, and what Christian 
life may be. It is good to familiarize ourselves with the his- 
tory of those whom God has pronounced the salt of the earth. 
We can not help contracting good from such association. 

And just one thing respecting this man whom we are to 
follow for some time to-day. Let us not be afraid of seeming 
to rise into a mere enthusiastic panegyric of a man. It is a 
rare man we have to deal with, one of God's heroic ones, a 
true conqueror ; one whose life and motives it is hard to 
understand without feeling warmly and enthusiastically 
about them ; one of the very highest characters, rightly 
understood, of all the Bible. Panegyric such as we can give, 
what is it after he has been stamped by his Master's 



John 's Rebuke of Herod, 6 1 7 

eulogy — " A prophet ? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a 
prophet. Among them that are born of women there hath 
not risen a greater than John the Baptist." In the verse 
which is to serve us for our guidance on this subject there 
are two branches which will afford us fruit of contempla- 
tion. It is written, " Herod being reproved by John for He- 
rodias." 

Here is our first subject of thought. The truthfulness of 
Christian character. 

And then next, he " shut up John in prison." 

Here is our second topic. The apparent failure of religious 
life. 

The point which we have to look at in this section of the 
Baptist's life is the truthfulness of religious character. For 
the prophet was now in a sphere of life altogether new. He 
had got to the third act of his history. The first was per* 
formed right manfully in the desert — that is past. He has 
now become a known man, celebrated through the country, 
brought into the world, great men listening to him, and in 
the way, if he chooses it, to become familiar with the polished 
life of Herod's court. For this we read : Herod observed 
John, that is, cultivated his acquaintance, paid him marked 
attention, heard him, did many things at his bidding, and 
heard him gladly. 

For thirty long years John had lived in that far-off desert, 
filling his soul with the grandeur of solitude, content to be 
unknown, not conscious, most likely, that there was any thing 
supernatural in him — living with the mysterious God in 
silence. And then came the day when the qualities, so 
secretly nursed, became known in the great world : men felt 
that there was a greater than themselves before them, and 
then came the trial of admiration, when the crowds congre- 
gated round to listen. And all that trial John bore unin- 
jured, for when those vast crowds dispersed at night, he was 
left alone with God and the universe once more. That pre- 
vented his being spoilt by flattery. But now comes the 
great trial. John is transplanted from the desert to the 
town : he has quitted simple life ; he has come to artificial 
life. John has won a king's attention, and now the question 
is. Will the diamond of the mine bear polishing without 
breaking into shivers ? Is the iron prophet melting into 
voluptuous softness? Is he getting the world's manners 
and the world's courtly insincerity ? Is he becoming arti- 
ficial through his change of life ? My Christian brethren, we 
find nothing of the kind. There he stands in Herod's volup- 
tuous court the prophet of the desert still, unseduced bv 



6 1 8 yohn 's Rebuke of Herod, 

blandishment from his high loyalty, and fronting his patron 
and his prince with the stern unpalatable truth of God. 

It is refreshing to look on such a scene as this — the highest, 
the very highest moment, I ""think, in all John's history ; 
higher than his ascetic life. For after all, ascetic life such as 
he had led before, when he fed on locusts and wild honey, is 
hard only in the first resolve. When you have once made 
up your mind to that, it becomes a habit to live alone. To 
lecture the poor about religion is not hard. To speak of un- 
worldliness to men with whom we do not associate, and who 
do not see our daily inconsistencies, that is not hard. To 
speak contemptuously of the world when we have no power 
of commanding its admiration, that is not difficult. But 
when God has given a man accomplishments or powers 
which would enable him to shine in society, and he can still 
be firm, and steady, and uncompromisingly true ; when he 
can be as undaunted before the rich as before the poor ; when 
rank and fashion can not subdue him into silence : when he 
hates moral evil as sternly in a great man as he would in a 
peasant, there is truth in that man. This was the test to 
which the Baptist was submitted. 

And now contemplate him for a moment ; forget that he 
is an historical personage, and remember that he was a man 
like us. Then comes the trial. All the habits and rules of 
polite life would be whispering such advice as this : " Only 
keep your remarks within the limits of politeness. If you 
can not approve, be silent ; you can do no good by finding 
fault with the great." We know how the whole spirit of a 
man like John would have revolted at that. Imprisonment ? 
Yes. Death ? Well, a man can die but once — any thing, 
but not cowardice — not meanness — not pretending what I do 
not feel, and disguising what I do feel. Brethren, death is 
not tlie worst thing in this life ; it is not difficult to die — five 
minutes and the sharpest agony is past. The worst thing in 
this life is cowardly untruthfulness. Let men be rough, if 
they will, let them be unpolished, but let Christian men in all 
they say be sincere. Xo flattery, no speaking smoothly to a 
man before his face, while all the time there is a disapproval 
of his conduct in the heart. The thing we want in Christi- 
anity is not politeness, it is sincerity. 

There are three things which we remark in this truthful- 
ness of John. The first is its straightforwardness, the second 
is its unconsciousness, and the last its unselfishness. The 
straightforwardness is remarkable in this circumstance, that 
there is no indirect coming to the point. At once, without 
circumlocution, the true man speaks. " It is not lawful for 



Johni^ Rebuke of Herod, 6ig 

thee to have her." There are some men whom God has 
gifted with a rare simplicity of heart, which makes them ut- 
terly incapable of pursuing the subtle excuses which can be 
made for evil. There is in John no morbid sympathy for the 
offender : " It is not lawful." He does not say, " It is best to 
do otherwise ; it is unprofitable for your own happiness to 
live in this way." He says plainly, " It is wrong for you to 
do this evil." 

Earnest men in this world have no time for subtleties and 
casuistry. Sin is detestable, horrible, in God's sight, and 
when once it has been made clear that it is not lawful, a 
Christian has nothing to do with toleration of it. If we dare 
not tell our patron of his sin we must give up his patronage. 
In the next place, there was unconsciousness in John's rebuke. 
We remark, brethren, that he was utterly ignorant that he 
was doing a fine thing. There was no sidelong glance, as 
in a mirror, of admiration for himself He was not feeling, 
This is brave. He never stopped to feel that after-ages 
would stand by, and look at that deed ol nis, and say, " Well 
done." His reproof comes out as the natural impulse of an 
earnest heart. John was the last of all men to feel that he 
had done any thing extraordinary. And this we hold to be 
an inseparable mark of truth. No true man is conscious that 
he is true ; he is rather conscious of insincerity. No brave 
man is conscious of his courage ; bravery is natural to him. 
The skin of Moses's face shone after he had been with God, 
but Moses wist not of it. 

There are many of us who would have prefaced that re- 
buke with a long speech. We should have begun by ob- 
serving how difficult it was to speak to a monarch, how del- 
icate the subject, how much proof we were giving of our 
friendship. We should have asked the great man to accept 
it as a proof of our devotion. John does nothing of this. 
Prefaces betray anxiety about self; John was not thinking 
of himself He was thinking of God's offended law, and the 
guilty king's soul. Brethren, it is a lovely and a graceful 
thing to see men natural. It is beautiful to see men sincere 
without being haunted with the consciousness of their sincer- 
ity. There is a sickly habit that men get of looking into 
themselves, and thinking how they are appearing. We are 
always unnatural when we do that. The very tread of one 
who is thinking how he appears to others, becomes dizzy 
with affectation. He is too conscious of what he is doing, and 
self-consciousness is affectation. Let us aim at being natural. 
And we can only become natural by thinking of God and duty, 
instead of the way in which we are serving God and duty. 



620 Johns Rebuke of Herod. 

There was, lastly, something exceedingly unselfish m 
John's truthfulness. We do not build much on a man's be- 
ing merely true. It costs some men nothing to be true, for 
they have none of those sensibilities which shrink from in- 
flicting pain. There is a surly, bitter way of speaking truth 
which says little for a man's heart. Some men have not 
delicacy enough to feel that it is an awkward and a painful 
thing to rebuke a brother: they are in their element when 
they can become censors of the great. John's truthfulness 
was not like that. It was the earnest loving nature of the 
man which made him say sharp things. Was it to gratify 
spleen that he reproved Herod for all the evils he had done ? 
Was it to minister to a diseased and disappointed misan- 
thropy ? Little do we understand the depth of tenderness 
which there is in a rugged, true nature, if we think that. 
John's whole life was an iron determination to crush self in 
every thing. 

Take a single instance. John's ministry was gradually su- 
perseded by the ministry of Christ. It was the moon wan- 
ing before the Sun. They came and told him that, " Rabbi, 
He to whom thou barest witness beyond Jordan baptizeth, 
and all men come unto Him." Two of his own personal 
friends, apparently some of the last he had left, deserted him, 
and went to the new teacher. 

And now let us estimate the keenness of that trial. Re- 
member John was a man : he had tasted the sweets of in- 
fluence ; that influence was dying away, and just in the prime 
of life he was to become nothing. Who can not conceive the 
keenness of that trial ? Bearing that in mind, what is the 
prophet's answer ? One of the most touching sentences in 
all Scripture — calmly, meekly, the hero recognizes his des- 
tiny — " He must increase, but I must decrease." He does 
more than recognize it — he rejoices in it, rejoices to be noth- 
ing, to be forgotten, despised, so as only Christ can be every 
thing. " The friend of the bridegroom rejoiceth because he 
heareth the bridegroom's voice, this my joy is fulfilled." And 
it is this man, with self so thoroughly crushed — the outward 
self by bodily austerities, the inward self by Christian hum- 
bleness — it is this man who speaks so sternly to his sovereign. 
" It is not lawful." Was there any gratification of human 
feeling there ? Or was not the rebuke unselfish ? Meant for 
God's honor, dictated by the uncontrollable hatred of all evil, 
careless altogether of personal consequences ? 

Now it is this, my brethren, that we want. The world- 
spirit can rebuke as sharply as the Spirit which was in John ; 
the world-spirit can be severe upon the great when it is 



John s Rebuke of Herod, 621 

jealous. The worldly man can not bear to hear of another's 
success, he can not endure to hear another praised for accom- 
plishments, or another succeeding in a profession, and the 
world can fasten very bitterly upon a neighbor's faults, and 
say, " It is not lawful." We expect that in the world. But 
that this should creep among religious men, that we should 
be bitter — that we, Christians^ should suffer jealousy to en- 
throne itself in our hearts — that we should find fault from 
spleen, and not from love — that we should not be able to be 
calm and gentle, and sweet-tempered, when we decrease, 
when our powers fail — that is the shame. The love of Christ 
is intended to make such men as John such high and heaven- 
ly characters. What is our Christianity worth if it can not 
teach us a truthfulness, an unselfishness, and a generosity be 
yond the world's ? 

We are to say something, in the second place, of the ap- 
parent failure of Christian life. 

The concluding sentence of this verse informs us that John 
was shut up in prison. And the first thought which sug- 
gests itself is, that a magnificent career is cut short too soon. 
At the very outset of ripe and experienced manhood the 
whole thing ends in failure. John's day of active usefulness 
is over ; at thirty years of age his work is done ; and what 
permanent effect have all his labors left ? The crowds that 
listened to his voice, awed into silence by Jordan's side, we 
hear of them no more. Herod heard John gladly, did much 
good by reason of his influence. What was all that worth ? 
The prophet comes to himself in a dungeon, and wakes to 
the bitter conviction that his influence had told much in the 
way of commanding attention, and even winning reverence, 
but very little in the way of gaining souls; the bitterest, the 
most crushing discovery in the whole circle of ministerial ex- 
perience. All this was seeming failure. 

And this, brethren, is the picture of almost all human life. 
To some moods, and under some aspects, it seems, as it seem- 
ed to the psalmist, " Man walketh in a vain shadow and dis- 
quieteth himself in vain." Go to any church-yard, and stand 
ten minutes among the grave-stones ; read inscription after 
inscription recording the date of birth, and the date of death, 
of him who lies below, all the trace which myriads have left 
behind of their having done their day's work on God's earth 
— that is failure or — seems so. Cast the eye down the col- 
umns of any commander's dispatch after a general action. 
The men fell by thousands ; the oflficers by hundreds. Cour- 
age, high hope, self-devotion, ended in smoke — forgotten by 
the time of the next list of slain : that is the failure of life 



62 2 Johns Rebuke of Herod. 

once more. Cast your eye over the shelves of a public li- 
brary — there is the hard toil of years, the product of a life 
of thought ; all that remains of it is there in a worm-eaten 
folio, taken down once in a century. Failure of human life 
again. Stand by the most enduring of all human labors, 
the pyramids of Egypt. One hundred thousand men, year 
by year, raised those enormous piles to protect the corpses 
of the buried from rude inspection. The spoiler's hand has 
been there, and the bodies have been rifled from their mau- 
soleum, and three thousand years have written " failure " 
upon that. In all that, my Christian brethren, if we look no 
deeper than the surface, we read the grave of human hope, 
the apparent nothingness of human labor. 

And then look at this history once more. In the isolation 
of John's dying hour there appears failure again. When a 
great man dies we listen to hear what he has to say, we turn 
to the last page of his biography first, to see what he had to 
bequeath to the world as his experience of life. "We expect 
that the wisdom, which he has been hiving up for years, will 
distill in honeyed sweetness then. It is generally not so. 
There is stupor and silence at the last. "How dieth the 
wise man ?" asks Solomon : and he answers bitterly, "As the 
fool." The martyr of truth dies privately in Herod's dun- 
geon. We have no record of his last words. There were no 
crowds to look on. We can not describe how he received 
his sentence. Was he calm? Was he agitated? Did he 
bless his murderer? Did he give utterance to any deep re- 
flections on human life ? All that is shrouded in silence. 
He bowed his head, and the sharp stroke fell flashing down. 
We know that, we know no more — apparently a noble life 
abortive. 

And now let us ask the question distinctly. Was all this 
indeed failure ? No, my Christian brethren, it was sublimest 
victory. John's work Avas no failure ; he left behind him no 
sect to which he had given his name, but his disciples passed 
into the service of Christ, and were absorbed in the Christian 
Church. Words from John had made impressions, and men 
forgot in after years where the impressions first came from, 
but the day of judgment will not forget. John laid the 
foundations of a temple, and others built upon it. He laid it 
in struggle, in martyrdom. It was covered up like the rough 
masonry below grotmd, but when we look round on the vast 
Christian Church we are looking at the superstructure of 
John's toil. 

There is a lesson for us in all that, if we will learn it. 
Work, true work, done honestly and manfully for Christ, 



Johi 's Rebuke of Hercd. 623 

never can be a failurCo Your own work, my brethren, which 
God has given you to do, whatever that is, let it be done 
truly. Leave eternity to show that it has not been in vain 
in the Lord, Let it but be work, it will tell. True Chris- 
tian life is like the march of a conquering army into a for- 
tress which has been breached ; men fall by hundreds in the 
ditch. Was their fall a failure ? Nay, for their bodies 
bridge over the hollow, and over them the rest pass on to 
victory. The quiet religious worship that we have this day 
— how comes it to be ours ? It was purchased for us by the 
constancy of such men as John, who freely gave their lives. 
AYe are treading upon a bridge of martyrs. The suffering 
was theirs — the victory is ours. John's career was no failure. 

Yet we have one more circumstance which seems to tell of 
failure. lu John's prison, solitude, misgiving, black doubt, 
seem for a time to have taken possession of the prophet's 
soul. All that we know of those feelings is this : John 
while in confinement sent two of his disciples to Christ, to 
say to Him, "Art thou He that should come, or do we look 
for another ?" Here is the language of painful uncertainty. 
\Ye shall not marvel at this if we look steadily at the cir- 
cumstances. Let us conceive John's feelings. The enthu- 
siastic child of Nature, who had roved in the desert, free as 
the air he breathed, is now suddenly arrested, and his strong 
restless heart limited to the four walls of a narrow dungeon. 
And there he lay startled. An eagle cleaving the air with 
motionless wing, and in the midst of his career brought from 
the black cloud by an arrow to the ground, and looking 
round with his wild, large eye, stunned, and startled there ; 
just such was the free prophet of the wilderness, when Her- 
od's guards had curbed his noble flight, and left him alone 
in his dungeon. 

Now there is apparent failure here, brethren : it is not the 
thing which we should have expected. We should have ex- 
pected that a man who had lived so close to God all his life 
would have no misgivings in his last hours. But, my breth- 
ren, it is not so. It is the strange truth that some of the 
highest of God's servants are tried with darkness on the dy- 
ing bed. Theory would say, when a religious man is laid up 
for his last struggles, now he is alone for deep communion 
with his God. Fact very often says, " No — now he is alone, 
as his Master was before him, in the wilderness to be tempted 
of the devil." Look at John in imagination, and you would 
say, " Now his rough pilgrimage is done. He is quiet, out 
of the world, with the rapt foretaste of heaven in his soul." 
Look at John m fact. He is agitated, sending to Christ, not 



624 Johns Rebuke of Herod, 

able to rest, grim doubt wrestling with his soul, misgiving 
for one last black hour whether all his hope has not been de- 
lusion. 

There is one thing we remark here by the way. Doubt 
often comes from inactivity. We can not give the philoso- 
phy of it, but this is the fact, Christians who have nothing to 
do but to sit thinking of themselves, meditating, sentimental- 
izing, are almost sure to become the prey of dark, black mis- 
givings. John struggling in the desert needs no proof that 
Jesus is the Christ. John shut up became morbid and doubt- 
ful immediately. Brethren, all this is very marvellous. The 
history of a human soul is marvellous. We are mysteries, 
but here is the practical lesson of it all. For sadness, for 
suffering, for misgiving, there is no remedy but stirring and 
doing. 

Now look once more at these doubts of John's. All his 
life long John had been wishing and expecting that the king- 
dom of God would come. The kingdom of God is right tri- 
umphant over wrong, moral evil crushed, goodness set up in 
its place, the true man recognized, the false man put down 
and forgotten. All his life long John had panted for that ; 
his hope was to make men better. He tried to make the sol- 
diers merciful, and the publicans honest, and the Pharisees sin- 
cere. His complaint was. Why is the world the thing it is ? 
All his life long he had been appealing to the invisible jus- 
tice of Heaven against the visible brute force which he saw 
around him. Christ had appeared, and his hopes were strain- 
ing to the utmost. " Here is the man !" And now, behold, 
here is no kingdom of heaven at all, but one of darkness still, 
oppression and cruelty triumphant, Herod putting God's 
prophet in prison, and the Messiah quietly letting things 
take their course. Can that be indeed Messiah ? All this 
was exceedingly startling. And it seems that then John be- 
gan to feel the horrible doubt whether the whole thing were 
not a mistake, and whether all that which he had taken for 
inspiration were not, after all, only the excited hopes of an 
enthusiastic temperament. Brethren, the prophet was well 
nigh on the brink of failure. 

But let us mark — that a man has doubts — that is not the 
evil; all earnest men must expect to be tried with doubts. 
All men who feel, with their whole souls, the value of the 
truth which is at stake, can not be satisfied with a "perhaps." 
Why, when all that is true and excellent in this world, all 
that is worth living for, is in that question of questions, it is 
no marvel if we sometimes wish, like Thomas, to see the prints 
of the nails, to know whether Christ be indeed our Lord oi 



Johris Rebuke of Herod, 625 

not. Cold hearts are not anxious enough to doubt. Men 
who love will have their misgivings at times ; that is not 
the evil. But the evil is, when men go on in that languid 
doubting way, content to doubt, proud of their doubts, mor- 
bidly glad to talk about them, liking the romantic gloom of 
twilight, without the manliness to say — I must and will 
know the truth. That did not John. Brethren, John ap- 
pealed to Christ. He did exactly what we do when we 
pray — and he got his answer. Our Master said to his disci- 
ples, Go to my suffering servant, and give him proof. Tell 
John the things ye see and hear — " The blind see, the deaf 
hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the Gospel is preached." 
There is a deep lesson wrapped up in this. We get a firm 
grasp of truth by prayer. Communion with Christ is the 
best proof of Christ's existence and Christ's love. It is so 
even in human life. Misgivings gather darkly round our 
heart about our friend in his absence ; but we seek his frank 
smile, we feel his affectionate grasp : our suspicions go to 
sleep again. It is just so in religion. No man is in the 
habit of praying to God in Christ, and then doubts whether 
Christ is He "that should come." It is in the power of 
prayer to realize Christ, to bring Him near, to make you feel 
His life stirring like a pulse within . you. Jacob could not 
doubt whether he had been with God when his sinew shrunk. 
John could not doubt whether Jesus was the Christ, when 
the things He had done were pictured out so vividly in an- 
swer to his prayer. Let but a man live with Christ, anxious 
to have his own life destroyed and Christ's life established 
in its place, losing himself in Christ, that man will have all 
his misgivings silenced. These are the two remedies for 
doubt — activity and prayer. He who works, and feels he 
works — he who prays, and knows he prays — has got the se- 
cret of transforming life-failure into life-victory. 

In conclusion, brethren, we make three remarks which 
could not be introduced into the body of this subject. The 
first is : let young and ardent minds, under the first impres- 
sions of religion, beware how they pledge themselves by any 
open profession to more than they can perform. Herod 
warmly took up religion at first, courted the prophet of re- 
ligion, and then when the hot fit of enthusiasm had passed 
away, he found that he had a clog round his life from which he 
could only disengage himself by a rough, rude effort. Breth- 
ren whom God has touched, it is good to count the cost be- 
fore you begin. If you give up present pursuits impetuously^ 
are you sure that present impulses will last ? Are ycu quite 
certain that a day will not come when you will curse the 



626 Johns Rebuke of Herod. 

hour in which you broke altogether with the world ? Are 
you quite sure that the revulsion back again will not be as 
impetuous as Herod's, and your hatred of the religion which 
has become a clog as intense as it now is ardent? 

Many things doubtless there are to be given up — amuse- 
ments that are dangerous, society that is questionable. What 
we give up, let us give up, not from quick feeling but from 
principle. Enthusiasm is a lovely thing, but let us be calm 
in what we do. In that solemn, grand thing — Christian life 
— one step backward is religious death. 

Once more : we get from this subject the doctrine of a res- 
urrection. John's life was hardness, his end was agony. 
That is frequently Christian life. Therefore, says the apos- 
tle, if there be no resurrection the Christian's choice is wrong ; 
" If in this life only we have hope in Christ, then are we of 
all men most miserable." Christian life is not visible success 
— very often it is the apparent opposite of success. It is the 
resurrection of Christ working itself out in us ; but it is very 
often the cross of Christ imprinting itself on us very sharply. 
The highest prize which God has to give here is martyrdom. 
The highest style of life is the Baptist's — heroic, enduring, 
manly love. The noblest coronet which any son of man can 
wear is a crown of thorns. Christian, this is not your rest. 
Be content to feel that this world is not your home. Home- 
less upon earth, try more and more to make your home in 
heaven, above with Christ. 

Lastly, we have to learn from this, that devotedness to 
Christ is our only blessedness. It is surely a strange thing 
to see the way in which men crowded round the austere 
prophet, all saying, " Guide us, we can not guide ourselves." 
Publicans, Pharisees, Sadducees, Herod, whenever John ap- 
pears, all bend before him, offering him homage and leader- 
ship. How do we account for this ? The truth is, the spirit 
of man groans beneath the weight of its own freedom. When 
a man has no guide, no master but himself, he is miserable ; 
we want guidance, and if we find a man nobler, wiser than 
ourselves, it is almost our instinct to prostrate our affections 
before that man, as the crowds did by Jordan, and say, " Be 
my example, my guide, my soul's sovereign." That passion- 
ate need of worship — hero-worship it has been called — is a 
primal, universal instinct of the heart. Christ is the answer 
to it. Men will not do ; we try to find men to re^'erence 
thoroughly, and we can not do it. We go through life, find- 
ing guides, rejecting them one after another, expecting no- 
bleness and finding meanness ; and we turn away with a re- 
coil of disappointment. 



yohn 's Rebuke of Herod. 627 

There is no disappointment in Christ. Christ can be our 
Bouls' sovereign. Christ can be our guide. Christ can ab- 
sorb all the admiration which our hearts long to give. We 
want to worship men. These Jews wanted to worship man. 
They were right — man is the rightful object of our worship; 
but in the roll of ages there has been but one Man whom we 
can adore without idolatry — the Man Christ Jesus. 



SERMONS 



JourtI) Qtxm. 



THE CHARACTER OF ELL 

**And the child Samuel ministered unto the Lord before Eli. And the 
"jford of the Lord was precious in those days; there was no open vision." — • 
1 Sam. iii. 1. 

It is impossible to read this chapter without perceiving 
that it draws a marked contrast between the two persons 
of whom it speaks — Eli and Samuel. 

1. They are contrasted in point of years : for the one is a 
boy, the other a gray-headed old man ; and if it were for 
only this, the chapter would be one of deep interest. For 
it is interesting always to see a friendship between the old 
and the young. It is striking to see the aged one retaining 
so much of freshness and simplicity as not to repel the sym- 
pathies of boyhood. It is surprising to see the younger one 
so advanced and thoughtful as not to find dull the society 
of one who has outlived excitability and passion. This is 
the picture presented in this chapter. A pair of friends — 
childhood and old age standing to each other in the relation- 
ship, not of teacher and pupil, but of friend and friend. 

2. They are contrasted, again, in point of office. Both are 
judges of Israel. But Eli is a judge rendering up his trust, 
and closing his public career. Samuel is a judge entering 
upon his office : and the outgoing ruler, Eli, is placed under 
very novel and painful circumstances in reference to his 
successor. He receives God's sentence of doom from the 
lips of the child he has taught, and the friend he has loved. 
The venerable judge of forty years is sentenced by the judge 
elect. 

3. Still more striking is the contrast in point of charactev. 



630 . The Character of Eli, 

A difference of character we expect when ages are so differ- 
ent. But here the difference of inferiority is on the wrong 
side. It is the young who is counselling, supporting, ad- 
monishing the old. It is not the ivy clinging for its own 
sake to the immovable wall, to be held up : but it is the 
badly built, mouldering wall held together by the ivy, and 
only by the ivy kept from falling piecemeal into ruin. 

4. Once more : we have here the contrast between a judge 
by office and a judge by Divine call. In the first days of 
the judges of Israel we find them raised up separately by 
God, one by one, one for each emergency. So that if war 
threatened the coasts of Israel, no man knew whence the 
help would come, or who would be Israel's deliverer. It 
always did come : there was always one, qualified by God, 
found ready for the day of need, equal to the need ; one 
whose fitness to be a leader no one had before suspected. 
But when he did appear, he proved himself to be Israel's 
acknowledged greatest — greatest by the qualities he dis- 
played, qualities given unto him by God. Therefore men 
rightly said he was a judge raised up by God. But it seems 
that in later days judges were appointed by hereditary suc- 
cession. When danger was always near, men became afraid 
of trusting to God to raise up a defender for them, and making 
no preparations for danger of invasion ; therefore, in the ab- 
sence of any special qualification marking out the man, the 
judge's son became judge at his father's death ; or the office 
devolved on the high-priest. This was Eli's qualification, it 
would seem. Eli was high -priest, and therefore he was 
judge. He appears not to have had a single ruling quality. 
He was only a judge because he was born to the dignity. 

There is an earthly wisdom in such an arrangement — nay, 
such an arrangement is indispensable. It is wise after an 
earthly sort to have an appointed succession. Hereditary 
judges, hereditary nobles, hereditary sovereigns : without 
them, human life would run into inextricable confusion. 
Nevertheless, such earthly arrangements only represent the 
heavenly order. The Divine order of government is the 
rule of the wise and good. The earthly arbitrary arrange- 
ment — hereditary succession, or any other — stands for this, 
representing it, more or less fulfills it, but never is it perfect- 
ly. And from time to time God sets aside and quashes the 
arbitrary arrangement, in order to declare that it is only a 
representation of the true and Divine one. From time to 
time, one who has qualifications direct from God is made, in 
Scripture, to stand side by side with one who has his qualifi- 
cations only from office or earthly appointment; and then 



The Character of Eli. 631 

the contrast is marvellous indeed. Thus Saul, the king ap 
pointed by universal suffrage of the nation, is set aside for 
David, the man after God's own heart : and thus the Jews, 
the world's hereditary nobles, descended from the blood and 
stock of Abraham, are set aside for the true spiritual succes- 
sion, the Christian Church — inheritors by Divine right, not 
of Abraham's blood, but of Abraham's faith. Thus the he- 
reditary high - priests in the genuine line of Aaron, priests 
by lawful succession, representing priestly powers, are set 
aside at once, so soon as the real High-Priest of God, Jesus 
Christ, whose priestly powers are real and personal, appears 
on earth. 

And thus by the side of Eli, the judge by office, stands 
Samuel, the judge by Divine call : qualified by wisdom, in- 
sight, will, resting on obedience, to guide and judge God's 
people Israel. Very instructive are the contrasts of this 
chapter: — We will consider — 

I. Eli's character. 
n. Eli's doom. 

1. Eli's character has two sides; we will take the brigM 
side first. The first point remarkable in him is the absence of 
envy. Eli furthers Samuel's advancement, and assists it to 
his own detriment. Very mortifying was that trial. Eli 
was the one in Israel to whom, naturally, a revelation should 
have come. God's priest and God's judge, to whom so fitly 
as to him could God send a message ? But another is pre- 
ferred : the inspiration comes to Samuel, and Eli is super- 
seded and disgraced. Besides this, every conceivable cir- 
cumstance of bitterness is added to his humiliation — God's 
message for all Israel comes to a boy : to one who had been 
Eli's pupil, to one beneath him, who had performed for him 
servile offices. This was the bitter cup put into his hand to 
drink. 

And yet Eli assists him to attain this dignity. He per- 
ceives that God has called the child. He does not say in 
petulance — " Then, let this favored child find out for himself 
all he has to do, I will leave him to himself." Eli meekly 
tells him to go back to his place, instructs him how he is to 
accept the revelation, and appropriate it : " Go lie down : and 
it shall be, if He call thee, that thou shall say. Speak, Lord ; 
for thy servant heareth." He conducts his rival to the pres- 
ence-chamber, which by himself he can not find, and leaves 
him there with the King, to be invested with the order which 
has been stripped off himself. 

Consider how difficult this conduct of Eli's was. Remem« 



632 The Character of EIL 

ber how difficult it is to be surpassed by a younger brother, 
and bear it with temper ; how hard it is even to be set rightj 
with meekness; to have our faults pointed out to us: es- 
pecially by persons who, in rank, age, or standing, are oui 
inferiors. Recollect how in our experience of life, in all pro« 
fessions, merit is kept down, shaded by jealousies. Recollect 
how rare generous enthusiasm is, or even fairness ; how men 
depreciate their rivals by coldness, or by sneering at those 
whom they dare not openly attack. 

It is hard to give information which we have collected 
with pains, but which we can not use, to another who can 
make use of it. Consider, again, how much of our English 
reserve is but another name for jealousy. Men often meet 
in society with a consciousness of rivalry ; and conversation 
flags because they fear to impart information, lest others 
should make use of it, and they should thus lose the credit 
of being original. 

One soldier we have heard of who gave up the post of 
honor and the chance of high distinction to cover an early 
failure of that great warrior whom England has lately lost, 
and to give him a fresh chance of retrieving honor. He did 
what Eli did : assisted his rival to rise above him. But 
where is the man of trade who will throw in a rival's way the 
custom which he can not use himself? Where is the profes- 
sional man, secular or clerical, who will so speak of another 
of the same profession, while struggling with him in honor- 
able rivalry, or so assist him, as to insure that the brightest 
lustre shall shine upon what he really is ? Whoever will 
ponder these things will feel that Eli's was no common act. 

Now, for almost all of us, there are one or two persons in 
life who cross our path, whose rise will be our eclipse, whose 
success will abridge ours, whose fair career will thwart ours, 
darken our prospects, cross our affections. Those one or two 
form our trial; they are the test and proof of our justice. 
How we feel and act to them proves whether we are just or 
not. It was easy for Eli to have instructed any one else 
how to approach God. But the difficulty was how to in- 
struct Samuel. Samuel alone, in all Israel, crossed his path. 
And yet Eli stood the test. He was unswervingly just. He 
threw no petty hindrances in his way. He removed alL 
He gave a clear, fair, honorable field. That act of Eli's is 
fair and beautiful to gaze upon. 

2. Remark the absence of all priestly pretensions. 

Eli might with ease have assumed the priestly tone. 
When Samuel came with his strange story, that he had heard 
a voice calling to him in the dark, Eli might have fixed upon 



The Character of EIL 633 

him a clear, cold, unsympathizing eye, and said, " This ia 
excitement — mere enthusiasm. I am the appointed channel 
of God's communications ; I am the priest. Hear the 
Church. Unordained, unanointed with priestly oil, a boy, a 
child, it is presumption for you to pretend to communica- 
tions from Jehovah ! A layman has no right to hear 
Voices; it is fanaticism." Eli might have done this; he 
would have only done what ordained men have done a 
thousand times when they have frowned irregular enthusiasm 
into dissent. And then Samuel would have become a mys- 
tic, or a self-relying enthusiast. For he could not have been 
made to think that the Voice was a delusion. That Voice 
no priest's frown could prevent his hearing. On the other 
hand, Eli might have given his own authoritative interpreta- 
tion to Samuel of that word of God which he had heard. 
But suppose that interpretation had been wrong? 

Eli did neither of these things. He sent Samuel to God. 
He taught him to inquire for himself He did not tell him 
to reject as fanaticism the belief that an inner Voice was 
speaking to him, a boy ; nor did he try to force his own in- 
terpretation on that Voice. His great care was to put Sam- 
uel in direct communication with God ; to make him listen 
to God ; nay, and that independently of him, Eli. Not to 
rule him; not to direct his feelings and belief; not to keep 
him in the leading-strings of spiritual childhood, but to teach 
him to walk alone. 

There are two sorts of men who exercise influence. Th'^ 
first are those who perpetuate their own opinions, bequeath 
their own names, form a sect, gather a party round them 
who speak their words, believe their belief. Such men were 
the ancient rabbis. And of such men, in and out of the 
Church, we have abundance now. It is the influence most 
aimed at and most loved. The second class is composed of 
those who stir up faith, conscience, thought, to do their own 
work. They are not anxious that those they teach should 
think as they do, but that they should think. Nor that they 
should take this or that rule of right and wrong, but that thay 
should be conscientious. ISTor that they should adopt their 
own views of God, but that faith in God should be roused in 
earnest. Such men propagate not many views ; but they 
propagate life itself in inquiring minds and earnest hearts. 

Xow this is God's real, best work. Men do not think so. 
They like to be guided. They ask. What am I to think ? 
and what am I to believe ? and what am I to feel ? Make it 
easy for me. Save me the trouble of reflecting and the an- 
guish of inquiring. It is very easy to do this for them j but 



634 The Character of Eli, 

from what minds, and from what books, do we really gain 
most of that which we can really call our own ? From those 
that are suggestive, from those that can kindle life within us^ 
and set us thinking, and call conscience into action — not from 
those that exhaust a subject and seem to leave it threadbare, 
but from those that make us feel there is a vast deal more 
in that subject yet, and send us, as Eli sent Samuel, into the 
dark Infinite to listen for ourselves. 

And this is the ministry and its work — not to drill hearts, 
and minds, and consciences, into right forms of thought and 
mental postures, but to guide to the Living God who speaks. 
It is a thankless work ; for, as I have said, men love to have 
all their religion done out for them. They want something 
definite, and sharp, and clear — words — not the life of God in 
the soul : and indeed, it is far more flattering to our vanity 
to have men take our views, represent us, be led by us. 
Rule is dear to all. To rule men's spirits is the dearest rule 
of all ; but it is the work of every true priest of God to lead 
men to think and feel for themselves — to open their ears 
that God may speak. Eli did this part of his work in a true 
spirit. He guided Samuel, trained his character. But 
" God's Spirit !" Eli says, " I can not give that. God's 
voice ! I am not God's voice. I am only God's witness, 
erring, listening for myself I am here, God's witness, to 
say — God speaks. I may err — let God be true. Let me be 
a liar, if you will. My mission is done w^hen your ear is 
opened for God to whisper into." Very true, Eli was super- 
seded. Very true, his work was done. A new set of views, 
not his, respecting Israel's policy and national life, were to 
be propagated by his successor ; but it was Eli that had 
guided that successor to God who gave the views : and Eli 
had not lived in vain. 

My brethren, if any man or any body of men stand be- 
tween us and the living God, saying, " Only through us — the 
Church — can you approach God ; only through my conse- 
crated touch can you receive grace ; only through my or- 
dained teaching can you hear God's voice ; and the voice 
which speaks in your soul in the still moments of existence 
is no revelation from God, but a delusion and a fanaticism " 
— that man is a false priest. To bring the soul face to face 
with God, and supersede ourselves, that is the work of the 
Christian ministry. 

3. There was in Eli a resolve to know the whole truth. 
"What is the thing that the Lord hath said unto thee ? I 
pray thee hide it not from me : God do so to thee, and more 
also, if thou hide any thing from me of all the things that 



The Character of Eli. 635 

He said unto thee." Eli asked in earnest to know the 
worst. 

It would be a blessed thing to know what God thinks of 
us. But next best to this would be to see ourselves in the 
light in which we appear to others : other men's opinion is a 
mirror in which we learn to see ourselves. It keeps us hum- 
ble when bad and good alike are known to us. The worst 
slander has in it some truth from which we may learn a les- 
son, which may make us wiser when the first smart is 
passed. 

Therefore it is a blessing to have a friend like Samuel, 
who can dare to tell us truth, judicious, candid, wise ; one to 
whom we can say, " Now tell me what I am, and what I 
seem ; hide nothing, but tell me the worst." But observe, 
we are not to beg praise or invite censure — that were weak. 
We are not to ask for every malicious criticism or torment- 
ing report — that were hypochondria, ever suspecting, and 
ever self-tormenting ; and to that diseased sensibility it 
would be no man's duty to minister. True friendship will 
not retail tormenting trifles ; but what we want is one friend 
at least, who will extenuate nothing, but with discretion tell 
the worst, using unflinchingly the sharp knife which is to cut 
away the fault. 

4. There was pious acquiescence in the declared will of 
God. When Samuel had told him every whit, Eli replied, 
"It is the Lord." The highest religion could say no more. 
What more can there be than surrender to the will of God ? 
In that one brave sentence you forget all Eli's vacillation. 
Free from envy, free from priestcraft, earnest, humbly sub- 
missive — that is the bright side of Eli's character, and the 
side least known or thought of 

There is another side to Eli's character. He was a waver- 
ing, feeble, powerless man, with excellent intentions, but an 
utter want of will ; and if w^e look at it deeply, it is will that 
makes the difi*erence between man and man ; not knowledge, 
not opinions, not devoutness, not feeling, but will — the pow- 
er to be. Let us look at the causes of this feebleness. 

There are apparently two. 1. A recluse life — he lived in 
the temple. Praying and sacrificing, perhaps, were the sub- 
stance of his life ; all that unfitted him for the w^orld ; he 
knew nothing of life ; he knew nothing of character. When 
Hannah came befoie him in an agony of prayer, he mis- 
judged her. He mistook the tremulousness of her lip for 
the trembling of intoxication. He could not rule his own 
household ; he could not rule the Church of God — a shy, sol* 
itary, amiable ecclesiastic and recluse — that was Eli. 



636 The Character of Eli. 

And such are the really fatal men in the work of life, those 
who look out on human life from a cloister, or who know 
nothing of men except through books. Religious persons 
dread worldliness. They will not mix in politics. They 
keep aloof from life. Doubtless there is a danger in know- 
ing too much of the world. But, beyond all comparison, of 
the two extremes the worst is knowing too little of life. A 
priesthood severed from human sympathies, separated from 
men, cut off from human affections, and then meddling fatal- 
ly with questions of human life — that is the Romish priest- 
hood. And just as fatal, when they come to meddle with 
public questions, is the interference of men as good as Eli, as 
devout and as incompetent, who have spent existence in a 
narrow religious party which they mistake for the world. 

2, That feebleness arose out of original temperament. Eli's 
feelings were all good: his acts were all wrong. In senti- 
ment Eli might be always trusted : in action he was forever 
false, because he was a weak, vacillating man. 

Therefore his virtues were all of a negative character. He 
was forgiving to his sons, because unable to feel strongly the 
viciousness of sin; free from jealousy, because he had no 
keen affections ; submissive, because too indolent to feel re- 
bellious. Before we praise a man for his excellences, we 
must be quite sure that they do not rise out of so many de- 
fects. No thanks to a proud man that he is not vain. No 
credit to a man without love that he is not jealous : he has 
not strength enough for passion. 

All history overrates such men. Men like Eli ruin families 
by instability, produce revolutions, die well when only pas- 
sive courage is wanted, and are reckoned martyrs. They 
live like children, and die like heroes. Deeply true to na- 
ture, brethren, and exceedingly instructive, is this history of 
Eli. It is quite natural that such men should suffer well. 
For if only their minds are made up for them by inevitable 
circumstances, they can submit. When people come to Eli 
and say, " You should reprove your sons," he can do it after 
a fashion ; when it is said to him, " You must die," he can 
make up his mind to die : but this is not taking up the cross. 
Let us look at the result of such a character. 

1. It had no influence. Eli was despised by his own sons. 
He was not respected by the nation. One only of all he 
lived with, kept cleaving ico him till the last — Samuel ; but 
that was in a kind of mournful pity. The secret of influence 
is will — not goodness, not badness — both bad and good may 
have it ; but will. And you can not counterfeit will if you 
have it not. Men speak strongly and vehemently when 



The Character of Eli, 637 

most conscious of their own vacillation. Thej; commit them^ 
selves to hasty resolutions, but the resolve is not kept ; and 
so, with strong feelings and good feelings, they lose influence 
day by day. 

2. It manifested incorrigibility. Eli was twice warned; 
once by a prophet, once by Samuel. Both times he answer- 
ed submissively. He used strong, nay, passionate expres- 
sions of penitence. Both times you would have thought an 
entire reformation and change of life was at hand. Both 
times he was warned in vain. 

There are persons who go through life sinning and sorrow- 
ing — sorrowing and sinning. No experience teaches them. 
Torrents of tears flow from their eyes. They are full of elo- 
quent regrets. You can not find it in your heart to condemn 
them, for their sorrow is so graceful and touching, so full of 
penitence and self-condemnation. But tears, heart-breaks, re- 
pentance, warnings, are all in vain. Where they did wrong 
once, they do wrong again. What are such persons to do in 
the next life ? Where will the Elis of this world be ? God 
only knows. But Christ has said, " Not every one that 
saith unto me, Lord,, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of 
heaven." 

3. It resulted in misery to others. 

Recollect what this weakness caused. Those young men, 
Eli's sons, grew up to be their country's plague. They sap- 
ped the moral standard of their countrymen and country- 
women. They degraded the ministry. " Men abhorred the 
oflering of the Lord." The armies of Israel, without faith in 
God, and without leadership of man, fled before the enemy. 
All that was Eli's doing. A weak man with good feelings 
makes more misery than a determined bad man. Under a 
tyranny men are at least at rest, for they know the worst. 
But when subjects or children know that by entreaty, or 
persistence, or intimidation, they can obtain what they want, 
then a family or a nation is cursed with restlessness. Better 
to live under bad laws which are firmly administered, than 
under good ones where there is a misgiving whether they may 
not be changed. There is no wretchedness like the wretched- 
ness caused by an undetermined will to those who serve un« 
der it. 



638 Appointment of the First King in Israel. 



n. 

THE APPOINTMENT OF THE FHIST KING IN 
ISRAEL. 

*'And Samuel said unto all Israel, Behold, I have hearkened unto yout 
voice in all that ye said unto me, and have made a king over you." — 1 Sam. 
xii. 1. 

Our subject to-day is the selection of the first king of Is- 
rael. 

We have arrived at that crisis in Israel's history when the 
first shock occurred in her national life. That shock was be- 
reft of part of its violence by the wisdom of a single man. 
By the lustre of his personal character, by his institutions, 
and by his timely concessions, Samuel won that highest of 
all privileges which can be given to a mortal — the power of 
saving his country. He did not achieve the best conceiva- 
ble ; but he secured the best possible. The conceivable best 
was, that there should have been no shock at all, that Israel's 
elders should have calmly insisted on a reformation of abuses : 
that they should have come to Samuel, and demanded repa- 
ration for the insulted majesty of Hebrew law in the persons 
of the young judges, his sons, who had dared to dishonor it. 
This would have been the first best. The second best was 
the best practicable — that the shock should be made as light 
as possible ; that Samuel should still control the destinies of 
his country, select the new king, and modify the turbulence 
of excess. So that Israel was in the position of a boat which 
has been borne down a swift stream into the very suction of 
the rapids. The best would be that she should be put back ; 
but if it be too late for this, then the best is that there should 
be in her a strong arm and a steady eye to keep her head 
straight. And thus it was with Israel. She plunged down 
the fall madly, rashly, wickedly; but, under Samuel's con- 
trol, steadily. This part of the chapter we arrange in two 
branches : — 

I. Samuel's conduct after the mortification of his own re- 
jection. 

II. The selection of the first monarch of Israel. 

I. The tenth chapter broke ofi' in a moment of suspense. 
The people, having accepted Saul as tlieir king, had been dis* 



Appoi7it'menf of the First Kmg in Israel. 639 

missed, and Samuel was left alone ; but his feelings were very 
different from those which he had in that other moment of 
solitude, when he had dismissed the delegates of the people. 
That struggle was past. He was now calm. The first mO' 
ment was a terrible one. It was one of those periods in hu- 
man life when the whole meaning of life is perplexed, its 
aims and hopes frustrated; when a man is down upon his 
face and gust after gust sweeps desolately over his spirit, 
Samuel was there to feel all the ideas that naturally suggest 
themselves in such hours — the instability of human affection 
— the nothingness of the highest earthly aims. But by de- 
grees two thoughts calmed him. The first w^as the feeling 
of identification with God's cause. " They have not rejected 
thee, but they have rejected Me." Had it been mere wound- 
ed pride, or pique, or family aggrandizement arrested, or am- 
bition disappointed, it would have been a cureless sorrow. 
But Samuel had God's cause at heart, and this gave a loftier 
character to his sadness. There was no envenomed feeling, 
no resentment, no smarting scornfulness. To be part of a 
great Divine cause which has failed, is an elevating as well 
as a saddening sensation. A conviction mingles with it that 
the cause of God will one day be the conquering side. 

The other element of consolation was the Divine sympa- 
thy. If they had been rebellious to their ruler, they had 
also been disloyal to Jehovah. An unruly subject has had. 
a poor school in which to learn reverence for things heaven- 
ly. Atheism and revolution here, as elsewhere, went hand- 
in-hand. "We do not know how this sentence was impressed 
by the Infinite Mind on Samuel's mind ; all we know is, he 
had a conviction that God was a fellow-sufferer. This, how- 
ever, was inferior, in point of clearness, to our knowledge of 
the Divine sympathy : Jehovah, the unnameable and awful, 
was a very different conception from " God manifested in 
the flesh." To the Jew, His dwelling was the peak round 
which the cloud had wreathed its solemn form, and the thun- 
ders spent themselves ; but the glory of the life of Jesus to 
us is, that it is full of the human. The many-colored phases 
of human feeling all find themselves reflected in the lights 
and shadows of ever-varying sensitiveness which the differ- 
ent sentences of His conversation exhibit. Be your tone of 
feeling what it may, whether you are poor or rich, gay or 
sad — in society or alone — adored, loved, betrayed, misunder- 
stood, despised — weigh well His words first, by thinking 
what they mean, and you Avill become aware that one heart 
in space throbs in conscious harmony with yours. In its 
degree, that was Samuel's support. 



640 Appointment of the First King in Israel, 

Next, Samuel's cheerful way of submitting to his fate is to 
be observed. Another prophet, when his prediction was 
nullified, built himself a booth and sat beneath it, fretting in 
Bullen pride, to see the end of Nineveh. Samuel might have 
done this; he might have withdrawn himself in offended dig- 
nity from public life, watched the impotent attempts of the 
people to guide themselves, and seen dynasty after dynasty 
fall with secret pleasure. Very different is his conduct. He 
addresses himself like a man to the exigencies of the mo- 
ment. His great scheme is frustrated. Well, he will not 
despair of God's cause yet. Bad as things are, he will try to 
make the best of them. 

Now remark in all this the healthy, vigorous tone of Sam- 
uel's religion. This man, the greatest and wisest then alive, 
thought this the great thing to live for — to establish a king- 
dom of God on earth — to transform his own country into a 
kingdom of God. It is worth while to see how he set about 
it. From first to last, it was in a practical, real way — by 
activity in every department of life. We recollect his early 
childhood ; his duty then was to open the gates of the tem- 
ple of the Lord, and he did that regularly, with scrupulous 
fidelity, in the midst of very exciting scenes. He was turn- 
ing that narrow circumscribed sphere of his into a kingdom 
of God. Afterwards he became ruler. His spirituality then 
consisted in establishing courts of justice, founding acade- 
mies, looking into every thing himself. Now he is deposed : 
but he has duties still. He has a king to look for, public fes- 
tivals to superintend, a public feast to preside over ; and 
later on we shall find him becoming the teacher of a school. 
All this w^as a religion for life. His spirituality was no fan- 
ciful, shadowy thing ; the kingdom of God to him was to be 
in this world, and we know no surer sign of enfeebled relig- 
ion than the disposition to separate religion from life and 
life-duties. 

Listen : what is secularity or worldliness ? Meddling 
with worldly things ? or meddling with a worldly spirit ? 
We brand political existence and thought with the name 
" worldly " — we stigmatize first one department of life and 
then another as secular; and so religion becomes a pale, 
unreal thing, Avhich must end, if we are only true to our 
principles, in the cloister. Spirituality becomes the exclusive 
property of a few amiable mystics; men of thought and men 
of action draw off; religion becomes feeble, and the world, 
deserted and proscribed, becomes infideh 

n. Samuel's treatment of his successor, after his own rejeo* 



Appoi7itment of the First King in Israel, 64 1 

tion, is remarkable. It was characterized by two things — • 
courtesy and generosity. When he saw^ the man who was 
to be his successor, he invited him to the entertainment ; he 
gave him precedence, bidding him go up before him ; placed 
him as a stranger at the post of honor, and set before him 
the choice portion. This is politeness ; what we allude to is 
a very different thing, however, from that mere system of 
etiquette and conventionalisms in which small minds find 
their very being, to observe which accurately is life, and to 
transgress which is a sin. 

Courtesy is not confined to the high-bred; often theirs is 
but the artistic imitation of courtesy. The peasant who 
rises to put before you his only chair, w^hile he sits upon the 
oaken chest, is a polite man. Motive determines every 
thing. If w^e are courteous merely to substantiate our 
claims to mix in good society, or exhibit good manners 
chiefly to show that we have been in it, this is a thing in- 
deed to smile at ; contemptible, if it were not rather pitiable. 
But that politeness w^hich springs spontaneously from the 
heart, the desire to put others at their ease, to save the 
stranger from a sensation of aw^kwardness, to soothe the 
feeling of inferiority^that, ennobled as it is by love, mounts 
to the high character of a heavenly grace. 

Something still more beautiful marks Samuel's generosity. 
The man who stood before him was a successful rival. One 
who had been his inferior now was to supersede him. And 
Samuel lends him a helping hand — gracefully assists him to 
rise above him, entertains him, recommends him to the peo- 
ple. It is very touching. 

Curiously enough, Samuel had twice in life to do a sim- 
ilar thing. Once he had to depose Eli, by telling him God's 
doom. Xow he has to depose himself The first he shrank 
from, and only did it at last when urged. That w^as deli- 
cate. On the present occasion, with a large and liberal full- 
ness of heart, he elevates Saul above himself And that we 
call the true, high Gospel spirit. Samuel and the people did 
the same thing — they made Saul king. But the people did 
it by drawing down Samuel nearer to themselves. Samuel 
did it by elevating Saul above himself One was the spirit 
of revolution, the other was the spirit of the Gospel. 

In our own day it specially behooves us to try the spirits, 
whether they be of God. The reality and the counterfeit, as 
in this case, are singularly like each other. Three spirits 
make their voices heard in a cry for freedom, for brother- 
hood, for human equality. And we must not forget, these 
are names hallowed by the very Gospel itself They are in> 

X 



642 Appointment of the First King in Israel, 

scribed on its forehead. Unless we realize them, we have no 
Gospel kingdom. Distinguish, however, well, the reality 
from the baser alloy. The spirit which longs for freedom 
puts forth a righteous claim; for it is written, "If the Son 
shall make you free ye shall be free indeed." Brotherhood — ■ 
the Gospel promises brotherhood also — "One is your Mas- 
ter, even Christ ; and all ye are brethren." Equality — yes. 
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, circumcision nor uncircum- 
cision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free." This is the grand 
federation, brotherhood, emancipation of the human race. 

Now, the world's spirit aims at bringing all this about by 
drawing others down to the level on which each one stands. 
The Christian spirit secures equality by raising up. The 
man that is less wise, less good than I — I am to raise up to 
my level in these things. Yes, and in social position, too, if 
he be fit for it. I am to be glad to see him rise above me, as 
generously as Samuel saw Saul. And those that are above 
me, better. than I, wiser than I, I have a right to expect to 
elevate me, if they can, to be as wise and good as themselves. 
This is the only levelling the Gospel knows. What was the 
mission of the Redeemer but this ? To raise the lower to 
the higher, to make men partakers of the Divine nature — His 
nature, standing on His ground ; to descend to the roots of 
society, reclaiming the outcasts, elevating the degraded, en- 
nobling the low, and reminding, in the thunder of reiterated 
" woes," those who had left their inferiors in the dark, and 
those who stood aloof in the titled superiority of rabbi — of 
the account to be rendered by them yet. 

And if we could but all work in this generous rivalry, our 
rent and bleeding country, sick at heart, gangrened with an 
exclusiveness which narrows our sympathies and corrupts our 
hearts, might be all that the most patriotic love would have 
her. Brethren in Christ, I earnestly urge again the lesson 
of last Sunday. Not- by pulling down those that are above 
us, not by the still more un-Christlike plan of keeping down 
those that are beneath us, can we make this country of ours 
a kingdom of Christ. If we can not practise nor bear to have 
impressed upon us, more condescension, more tenderness, and 
the duty of unlearning much, very much of that galling, in- 
sulting spirit of demarkation with which we sever ourselves 
from the sympathies of the class immediately beneath us, 
those tears may have to flow again which were shed over the 
city which would not know the day of her visitation : lulled 
into an insane security even at the moment when the judg- 
ment-eagles were gathered together and plunging for theif 
prey. 



Appointment of the First King in Israel, 643 

Once more : there is suggested to us the thought that Sam- 
uel was now growing old. It seems by the eleventh and 
thirteenth chapters, in connection with the text, that the 
cause which hastened the demand of the elders for a king 
was the danger of invasion. The Ammonites and Philistines 
were sharpening their swords for war. And men felt that 
Samuel was too old for such a crisis. Only a few Sundays 
ago we were considering Samuel's childhood, his weaning, 
education, and call. Now he is old: his hair is gray, and 
men beginning to feel that he is no longer what he was. A 
high, great life ; and a few chapters sum it all up. And such 
is all life. 

To-day we baptize a child; in a period of time startlingly 
short, the minister is called upon to prepare the young man 
for confirmation. A little interval and the chimes are ring- 
ing a merry wedding-peal. One more pause, and the winds 
are blowing their waves of shadow over the long grass that 
grows rankly on his grave. The font, the altar, and the 
sepulchre, and but a single step between. Now we do not 
dwell on this. It is familiar — a tale that is told. 

But what we mention this for is, to observe that though 
Samuel's life was fast going, Samuel's work was permanent. 
Evidence of this lies in the chapter before us. When Saul 
came to the city and inquired for the seer's house, some young 
maidens, on their way to draw water, replied ; and their re- 
ply contained an accurate account, even to details, of the re- 
ligious service which was about to take place. The judge 
had arrived ; there was to be a sacrifice, the people would 
not eat till he came, he would pronounce a blessing, after 
that there would be a select feast. Now compare the state 
of things in Israel when Samuel became judge. Had a man 
come to a city in Israel then, there would have been no 
sacrifice going on, or if there had, no one would have been 
found so accurately familiar with the whole service ; for then 
" men abhorred the offering of the Lord." But now the first 
chance passer-by could run through it all, as a thing habitu- 
al — as a Church of England worshipper would tell you the 
hours of service, and the order of its performance. So that 
they might forget Samuel — they might crowd round his suc- 
cessor — but Samuel's work could not be forgotten : years 
after he was quiet and silent under ground, his courts in Bethel 
and Mizpeh would form the precedents and the germs of the 
national jurisprudence. 

A very pregnant lesson. Life passes, work is permanent. 
It is all going — fleeting and withering. Youth goes. Mind 
decays. That which is done remains. Through ages, through 



644 Prayer. 

eternity, what you have done for God, that, and only that, 
you are. Ye that are workers, and count it the soul's worst 
disgrace to feel life passing in idleness and uselessness, take 
courage. Deeds never die. 



III. 
PRAYER. 

** And he went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, 
my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me : nevertheless, not as I 
wlU, but as thou wilt." — Matt. xxvi. 39. 

Xo one will refuse to identify holiness with prayer. To 
say that a man is religious is to say the same thing as to say 
he prays. For what is prayer ? To connect every thought 
with the thought of God. To look on every thing as His 
work and His appointment. To submit every thought, wish, 
and resolve to Him. To feel His presence, so that it shall 
restrain us even in our wildest joy. That is prayer. And 
what we are now, surely we are by prayer. If we have at- 
tained any measure of goodness, if we have resisted tempta- 
tions, if we have any self-command, or if we live with aspira- 
tions and desires beyond the common, we shall not hesitate 
to ascribe all to prayer. 

There is therefore no question among Christians about the 
efficacy of prayer ; but that granted generally, then question- 
ings and diversities of view begin. What is prayer? What 
is the efficacy of prayer? Is prayer necessarily words in 
form and sequence ; or is there a real prayer that never can 
be syllabled ? Does prayer change the outward universe, or 
does it alter our inward being ? Does it work on God, or 
does it work on us? 

To all these questions, I believe a full and sufficient answer 
is returned in the text. Let us examine it calmlj^, and with- 
out prejudice or prepossession. If we do, it can not be but 
that we shall obtain a conclusion in which we may rest with 
peace, be it what it eventually may. We will consider — 

I. The right of petition. 
n. Erroneous views of what prayer is. 
in. The true efficacy of prayer. 

I. The right of petition. " Let this cup pass from me." 
We infer it to be a right — 1 . Because it is a necessity of our 
human nature. 



Prayer. 645 

The Son of Man feels the hour at hand : shrinks from it, 
seeks solitude, flies from human society — feels the need of it 
again, and goes back to his disciples. Here is that need of 
sympathy which forces us to feel for congenial thought 
among relations ; and here is that recoil from cold unsympa- 
thizing natures, which forces us back to our lonelmess again. 
In such an hour, they who have before forgotten prayer be- 
take themselves to God : and in such an hour, even the most 
resigned are not without the wish, "Let this cup pass." 
Christ Himself has a separate wish — one human wish. 

Prayer, then, is a necessity of our humanity, rather than a 
duty. To force it as a duty is dangerous. Christ did not ; 
never commanded it, never taught it till asked. This neces- 
sity is twofold. First, the necessity of sympathy. We touch 
other human spirits only at a point or two. In the deepest 
departments of thought and feeling we are alone ; and the 
desire to escape that loneliness finds for itself a voice in 
prayer. 

Next, the necessity of escaping the sense of a crushing 
fate. The feeling that all things are fixed and unalterable, 
that we are surrounded by necessities which we can not 
break through, is intolerable whenever it is realized. Our 
egotism cries against it ; our innocent egotism, and the prac- 
tical reconciliation* between our innocent egotism and hid- 
eous fatalism is prayer, which realizes a living Person ruling 
all things with a will. 

2. Again, we base this right on our privilege as children. 
"My Father" — that sonship Christ shares with us reveals 
the human race as a family in which God is a Father, and 
Himself the elder brother. It would be a strange family, 
where the child's will dictates ; but it would be also strange 
Avhere a child may not, as a child, express its foolish wish, 
if it be only to have the impossibility of gratifying it ex- 
plained. 

3. Christ used it as a right, therefore we may. 

There is many a case in life, where to act seems useless — 
many a truth which at times appears incredible. Then we 
throw ourselves on Him — He did it. He believed it, that is 
enough. He was wise, where I am foolish. He was holy, 
where I am evil. He must know. He must be right. I rely 
on Him. Bring what arguments you may: say that prayer 
can not change God's will. I know it. Say that prayer ten 
thousand times comes back like a stone. Yes, but Christ 
prayed, therefore I may and I will pray. Not only so, but I 
must pray ; the wish felt and not uttered before God, is a 
* Mesothesis. 



646 Prayer, 

prayer. Speak, if your heart prompts, in articulate words, 
but there is an unsyllabled wish, which is also prayer. You 
can not help praying, if God's Spirit is in yours. 

Do not say, I must wait till this tumult has subsided and I 
am calm. The worst storm of spiiit is the time for prayer: 
the Agony was the hour of petition. Do not stop to calcu- 
late improbabilities. Prayer is truest when there is most of 
instinct and least of reason. Say, " My Father, thus I fear 
and thus I wish. Hear thy foolish, erring child — let this 
cup pass from me." 

II. Erroneous notions of what prayer is. They are con- 
tained in that conception w^hich He negatived, "As I will." 

A common popular conception of prayer is, that it is the 
means by which the wish of man determines the will of God. 
This conception finds an exact parallel in those anecdotes 
with which Oriental history abounds, wherein a sovereign 
gives to his favorite some token, on the presentation of which 
every request must be granted. As when Ahasuerus prom- 
ised Queen Esther that her petition should be granted, even 
to the half of his kingdom. As when Herod swore to He- 
rodias's daughter that he would do whatever she should re- 
quire. It will scarcely be said that this is a misrepresenta- 
tion of a very common doctrine, for they who hold it would 
state it thus, and would consider the mercifulness and privi- 
lege of prayer to consist in this, that by faith we can obtain 
all that we wa.it. 

Now, in the text it is said distinctly this is not the aim of 
prayer, nor its meaning. ^^Not as I will." The wish of man 
does not determine the will of God. 

Try this conception by four tests. 

1. By its incompatibility with the fact that this universe 
is a system of laws. Things are thus, rather than thus. 
Such an event is invariably followed by such a consequence. 
This we call a law. All is one vast chain, from which if you 
strike a single link, you break the whole. It has been truly 
said that to heave a pebble on the sea-shore one yard higher 
up would change all antecedents from the creation, and all 
4;onsequents to the end of time. For it would have required 
a greater force in the wave that threw it there — and that 
would have required a different' degree of strength in the 
storm — that again, a change of temperature all over the 
globe — and that again, a corresponding difference in the tem- 
peraments and characters of the men inhabiting the different 
countries. 

So that when a child wishes a fine day for his morrow's 



Prayer. 647 

excursion, and hopes to have it by an alteration of what 
would have been without his wish, he desires nothing less 
than a whole new universe. 

It is difficult to state this in all its force except to men 
who are professionally concerned with the daily observation 
of the uniformity of the Divine laws. But when the astron- 
omer descends from his serene gaze upon the moving heav- 
ens, and the chemist rises from contemplating those marvel 
lous affinities, the proportions of which are never altered, 
realizing the fact that every atom and element has its own 
mystic number in the universe to the end of time ; or when 
the economist has studied the laws of wealth, and seen how 
fixed they are and sure : then to hear that it is expected 
that, to comply with a mortal's convenience or plans, God 
shall place this whole harmonious system at the disposal ot 
selfish humanity, seems little else than impiety against the 
Lord of law and order. 

2. Try it next by fact. 

Ask those of spiritual experience. We do not ask whether 
prayer has been efficacious — of course it has. It is God's or- 
dinance. Without prayer the soul dies. But what we ask 
is, whether the good derived has been exactly this, that 
prayer brought them the very thing they wished for ? For 
instance, did the plague come and go according to the laws 
of prayer or according to the laws of health ? Did it come 
because men neglected prayer, or because they disobeyed 
those rules which His wisdom has revealed as the conditions 
of salubrity ? And when it departed, was it because a na- 
tion lay prostrate in sackcloth and ashes, or because it arose 
and girded up its loins and removed those causes and those 
obstructions which, by everlasting law, are causes and ob- 
structions? Did the catarrh or the consumption go from 
him who prayed, sooner than from him Avho humbly bore it 
in silence ? Try it by the case of Christ — Christ's prayer 
did not succeed. He prayed that the cup might pass from 
Him. It did not so pass. 

Now lay down the irrefragable principle, " The disciple is 
not above his master, nor the servant above his lord. It is 
enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the 
servant as his lord." What Christ's prayer was not effica 
cious to do, that ours is not certain to effect. If the object 
of petition be to obtain, then Christ's prayer failed ; if the 
refusal of His petition did not show the absence of the favor 
of His Father, then neither does the refusal of ours. 

Nor can you meet this by saying, " His prayer could not 
succeed, because it was decreed that Christ should die ; but 



648 Prayer, 

ours may, because nothing hangs on our fate, and we knoT^ 
of no decree that is against our wish." 

Do you mean that some things are decreed and some are 
left to chance ? That would make a strange, disconnected 
universe. The death of a worm, your death, its hour and 
moment, are all fixed, as much as His was. Fortuity, chance, 
contingency, are only words which express our ignorance of 
causes. 

3. Try it by the prejudicial results of such a belief. 

To think that prayer changes God's will gives unworthy 
ideas of God. It supposes our will to be better than His, 
the Unchangeable, the Unsearchable, the All -wise. Can 
you see the All of things — the consequences and secret con- 
nections of the event you wish ? and if not, would you really 
desire the terrible power of infallibly securing it ? 

Consider, also, the danger of vanity and supineness result- 
ing from the fulfillment of our desires as a necessity. Who 
does not recollect such cases in childhood, when some curi- 
ous coincidences with our wishes were taken for direct re- 
plies to prayer, and made us fancy ourselves favorites of 
Heaven, in possession of a secret spell. These coincidences 
did not make us more earnest, more holy, but rather the re- 
verse. Careless and vain, we fancied we had a power which 
superseded exertion, we looked down contemptuously on 
others. Those were startling and wholesome lessons which 
came when our prayer failed, and threw our whole childish 
theory into confusion. It is recorded that a favorite once 
received from his sovereign a ring as a mark of her regard, 
with a promise that whenever he presented that ring to her 
she would grant his request. He entered on rebellion, from 
a vain confidence in the favor of his sovereigjn. The rinsj 
which he sent was kept back by his messenger, and he was 
executed. So would we rebel if prayer were efficacious to 
change God's will and to secure His pardon. 

4. It would be most dangerous, too, as a criterion of our 
spiritual state. If we think that answered prayer is a proof 
of grace, we shall be unreasonably depressed and unreason- 
ably elated — depressed when we do not get what we wish, 
elated when we do ; besides, we shall judge uncharitably of 
Dtlier men. 

Two farmers pray, the one whose farm is on light land, 
for rain ; the other, whose contiguous farm is on heavy soil, 
for fine weather ; plainly one or tlie other must come, and 
that which is good for one may be injurious to the other. 
If this be the right view of prayer, then the one who does 
not obtain his wish must mourn, doubting God's favor, or 



Prayer, 649 

oelieving that he did not pray in faith. Two Christian 
armies meet for battle — Cliristian men on both sides pray 
for success to their own arms. Now if victory be given to 
prayer, independent of other considerations, we are driven 
to the pernicious principle, that success is the test of right. 

From all which the history of this prayer of Christ deliv- 
ers us. It is a precious lesson of the cross, that apparent 
failure is eternal victory. It is a precious lesson of this 
prayer, that the object of prayer is not the success of its pe- 
tition ; nor is its rejection a proof of failure. Christ's peti- 
tion was not gratified, yet He was the One well-beloved of 
His Father. 

in. The true efficacy of prayer — ^'As Thou wilt." 
All prayer is to change the will human into submission to 
the will Divine. Trace the steps in this history by which 
the mind of the Son of Man arrived at this result. First, we 
find the human wish almost unmodified, that " that cup 
might pass from Him." Then He goes to the disciples, and 
it would appear that the sight of those disciples, cold, un- 
sympathetic, asleep, chilled His spirit, and set that train of 
thought in motion which suggested the idea that perhaps 
the passing of that cup was not His Father's will. At all 
events. Pie goes back with this perhaps — "7/" this cup may 
not pass from me except I drink it. Thy will be done." He 
goes back again, and the words become more strong : " Nev- 
theless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt." The last time He 
comes, all hesitancy is gone. Not one trace of the human 
wish remains ; strong in submission, He goes to meet His 
doom — " Rise, let us be going : behold, he is at hand that 
doth betray me." This, then, is the true course and history 
of prayer. Hence we conclude — 

1. That prayer which does not succeed in moderating our 
wish, in changing the passionate desire into still submission, 
the anxious, tumultuous expectation into silent surrender, 
is no true prayer, and proves that we have not the spirit of 
true prayer. 

Hence, too, we learn — 

2. That life is most holy in which there is least of petition 
and desire, and most of waiting upon God : that in which 
petition most often passes into thanksgiving. In the prayer 
taught by Christ there is only one petition for personal good, 
and that a singularly simple and modest one, " Give us this 
day our daily bread," and even that expresses dependence 
far rather than anxiety or desire. 

From this we understand the spirit of that retirement fo? 



650 Prayer, 

prayer into lonely tops of mountains and deep shades of 
night, of which we read so often in His life. It was not sc 
much to secure any definite event as from the need of hol^ 
communion with His Father — prayer without any definite 
wish ; for we must distinguish two things which are often 
confounded. Prayer for specific blessings is a very diflferent 
thing from communion with God. Prayer is one thing, 
petition is quite another. Indeed, hints are given us which 
make it seem that a time will come when spirituality shall 
be so complete, and acquiescence in the will of God so en 
tire, that petition shall be superseded. " In that day ye 
shall ask me nothing;" "Again I say not I will pray the 
Father for you, for the Father Himself loveth you." And 
to the same purpose are all those passages in which He dis- 
countenances the heathen idea of prayer, which consists in 
urging, prevailing upon God. " They think that they shall 
be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like 
unto them : for your Father knoweth what things ye have 
need of before ye ask Him." 

Practically then, I say. Pray as He did, till prayer makes 
you cease to pray. Pray till prayer makes you forget your 
own wish, and leave it or merge it in God's will. The Di- 
vine wisdom has given us prayer, not as a means whereby 
to obtain the good things of earth, but as a means whereby 
we learn to do without them ; not as a means whereby we 
escape evil, but as a means whereby w^e become strong to 
meet it. " There appeared an angel unto Him from heaven, 
strengthening Him." That w^as the true reply to His 
prayer. 

And so, in the expectation of impending danger, our 
prayer has won the victory, not when we have warded oflT 
the trial, but when, like Him, we have learned to say, "Arise, 
let us go to meet the evil." 

Now, contrast the moral consequences of this view of 
prayer with those which, as we saw, arise from the other 
view. Hence comes that mistrust of our own understanding 
which will not suffer us to dictate to God. Hence, that 
benevolence w^hich, contemplating the good of the whole 
rather than self-interest, dreads to secure what is pleasing to 
self at the possible expense of the general weal. Hence, that 
humility which looks on ourselves as atoms, links in a mys- 
terious chain, and shrinks from the dangerous w4sh to break 
the chain. Hence, lastly, the certainty that the All-wise is 
the All-good, and that " all things work together for good," 
for the individual as well as for the whole. Then, the selfish 
cry of egotism being silenced, we obtain Job's sublime spirit, 



Perversion, as shown in Balaam s Character, 65 1 

*' Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not 
receive evil?" 

There is one objection may be made to this. It may be 
said, If this be prayer, I have lost all I prized. It is sad and 
depressing to think that prayer will alter nothing, and bring 
nothing that I wish. All that was precious in prayer ijt 
struck away from me. 

But one word in reply. You have lost the certainty of 
getting your own wish ; you have got instead the compen- 
sation of knowing that the best possible, best for you, best 
for all, will be accomplished. Is that nothing? and will you 
dare to say that prayer is no boon at all unless you can re* 
verse the spirit of youi Master's prayer, and say, " Not as 
Tkou wilt, but as Z will ?" 



IV. 

PERVERSION, AS SHOWN IN BALAAM'S 
CHARACTER. 

"And Balaam said unto the angel of the Lord, I have sinned ; for I knew 
not that thou stoodest in the way against me : now therefore, if it displease 
thee, I will get me back again. And the angel of the Lord said unto Balaam, 
Go with the men : but only the word that I shall speak unto thee, that thou 
shalt speak. So Balaam went wdth the princes of Balak." — Num. xxii. 34, 35. 

The judgment which we form on the character of Balaam 
is one of unmitigated condemnation. We know and say 
that he was a false prophet and a bad man. This is how- 
ever, doubtless, because we come to the consideration of his 
history having already prejudged his case. 

St. Peter, St. Jude, and St. John have p issed sentence upon 
him. " Having eyes full of adultery, and that can not cease 
from sin ; beguiling unstable souls : a heart they have exer- 
cised with covetous practices; cursed children: which have 
forsaken the right way, and are gone astray, following the 
way ol Balaam the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of 
unrighteousness, but was rebuked for his iniquity : the dumb 
ass speaking with man's voice forbade the madness of the 
prophet ;" " Woe unto them ! for they have gone in the way 
of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for re- 
ward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core ;" " But I have 
a few things against thee, because thou hast there them that 
hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balak to cast a 
stumbling-block before the children of Israel, to eat things 



652 Perversion, as shown in Balaam^ Character, 

sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication." And so we 
read the history of Balaam familiar with these passages, and 
coloring all with them. 

But assuredly this is not the sentence we should have pro* 
nounced if we had been left to ourselves, but one much less 
severe. Repulsive as Balaam's character is when it is seen 
at a distance, when it is seen near it has much in it that is 
human, like ourselves, inviting compassion — even admira- 
tion : there are traits of firmness, conscientiousness, noble- 
ness. 

For example, in the text, he offers to retrace his steps as 
soon as he perceives that he is doing wrong. He asks guid- 
ance of God before he will undertake a journey : "And he 
said unto them. Lodge here this night, and I will bring you 
word again, as the Lord shall speak unto me." He professes 
— and in earnest — "If Balak would give me his house full of 
silver and gold, I can not go beyond the word of the Lord 
my God, to do less or more." He prays to " die the death 
of the righteous, and that his last end may be like his." Yet 
the inspired judgment of his character, as a whole, stands re 
corded as one of unmeasured severity. 

And accordingly one of the main lessons in Balaam's his- 
tory must ever be, to trace how it is that men, who to the 
world appear respectable, conscientious, honorable, gifted, re- 
ligious, may be in the sight of God accursed, and heirs of 
perdition. Our subject, then, to-day is perversion; 

L Perversion of great gifts. 
n. Perversion of the conscience. 

L Of great gifts. 

Tlie history tells of Balak sending to Pethor for Balaam 
to curse the Israelites. This was a Common occurrence in 
ancient history. There was a class of men regularly set 
apart to bless and curse, to spell-bind the winds and foretell 
events. Balaam was such an one. 

Now the ordinary account would be that such men were 
impostors, or endued with political sagacity, or had secret 
dealings with the devil. But the Bible says Balaam's inspi- 
ration was from God. 

It did not arise from diabolical agency, or from merely 
political sagacity : that magnificent ode of sublime poetry, 
given in chapter xxiv., is from God. 

The Bible refers the inspiration of the poet, of the proph- 
et, of the worker in cunning workmanship, to God. It 
makes no mention of our modern distinction between that 
inspiration enjoyed by the sacred writers and that enjoyed 



Perversion, as shown in Balaam's Character. 653 

by ordinary men, except so far as the use is concerned. 
God's prophets glorified Him. The wicked prophets glori- 
fied themselves ; but their inspiration was real, and came 
from God, and these divine powers w^ere perverted — 

1. By turning them to purposes of self-aggrandizement. 
Now, remember how the true prophets of Jehovah spoke. 

Simply, with no affectation of mystery, no claims to mystical 
illumination. They delighted to share their power with their 
fellows ; they said, " The heart of the Lord was with them 
that fear Him ;" that the Lord " dwelt with an humble and 
contrite heart." They represented themselves as inspired, 
not because greater or wiser than their brethren, but be- 
cause more weak, more humble, and dependent upon God. 

Contrast Balaam's conduct. Every thing is done to show 
the difference between him and others — to fix men's atten- 
tion upon himself — the wonderful, mysterious man who is in 
communication with Heaven. He builds altars, and uses 
enchantments. These were a priest's manoeuvres, not a 
prophet's. 

He was the solitary self-seeker — alone, isolated, loving to 
be separated from all other men ; admired, feared and 
sought. 

Balak struck the key-note of his character when he said, 
"Am I not able to promote thee unto honor?" Herein, 
then, lies the first perversion of glorious gifts : that Balaam 
nought not God's honor but his own. 

2. By making those gifts subservient to his own greed. 

It is evident that Balaam half suspected his own failing. 
Otherwise w^hat mean those vaunts, " If Balak would give 
me his house full of silver and gold ?" Brave men do not 
vaunt their courage, nor honorable men their honesty, nor do 
the truly noble boast of high birth. All who understand 
the human heart perceive a secret sense of weakness in these 
loud boasts of immaculate purity. Silver and gold, these 
w^ere the things he loved, and so, not content with commun- 
ion with God, with the possession of sublime gifts, he 
thought these only valuable so far as they were means of 
putting himself in possession of riches. Thus spiritual pow- 
ers were degraded to make himself a vulgar man of wealth. 

There are two opposite motives which sway men. Some, 
like Simon Magus, will give gold to be admired and wonder- 
ed at; some will barter honor for gold. In some the two 
are blended ; as in Balaam, w^e see the desire for honor and 
wealth— wealth, perhaps, as being another means of insuring 
reputation. And so have we seen many begin and end in 
our own day — begin with a high-minded courage which flat- 



654 Perversion^ as shown in Balaam's Character, 

ters none ; speaks truth, even unpalatable truth ; but when 
this advocacy of truth brings men, as it brought to Balaam, 
to consult them, and they rise in the world, or in a court, 
and become men of consideration, then by degrees the plain 
truth is sacrificed to a feverish love of notoriety, the love of 
truth is superseded, and passes into a love of influence. 

Or they begin with a generous indifference to wealth-^ 
simple, austere ; by degrees they find the society of the rich 
leading them from extravagance to extravagance, till at last 
high intellectual and high spiritual powers become the serv- 
ile instruments of appropriating gold. The world sees the 
sad spectacle of the man of science and the man of God wait- 
ing at the doors of princes, or cringing before the pxiblic for 
promotion and admiration. 

11. Perversion of conscience. 

1. The first intimation we have of the fact that Balaam 
was tampering with his conscience is in his second appeal to 
God. On the first occasion God said, " Thou shalt not go 
with them ; thou shalt not curse the people ; for they are 
blessed." Then more honorable messengers were sent from 
Balak, with larger bribes. Balaam asks permission of God 
again. Here is the evidence of a secret hollowness in his 
heart, however fair the outside seemed. In worldly matters, 
" think twice ;" but in duty, it has been well said, " first 
thoughts are best ;" they are more fresh, more pure, have 
more of God in them. There is nothing like the first glance 
we get at duty, before there has been any special pleading 
of our affections or inclinations. Duty is never uncertain at 
first. It is only after we have got involved in the mazes and 
sophistries of wishing that things were otherwise than they 
are that it seems indistinct. Considering a duty is often 
only explaining it away. Deliberation is often only dishon- 
esty. God's guidance is plain, when we are true. 

Let us understand in w^hat Balaam's hollowness consisted. 
He wanted to please himself without displeasing God. The 
problem was how to go to Balak, and yet not to offend God. 
He would have given worlds to get rid of his duty ; and he 
went to God to get his duty altered, not to learn what his 
duty was. All this rested upon an idea that the will of God 
makes right, instead of being right — as if it were a capric6 
which can be altered, instead of the law of the universe, 
which can not alter. 

How deeply this principle is ingrained in human nature 
you may see from the Roman Catholic practice of indul- 
gences. The Romish Church permits transgressions for a 



Perversion, as shown in Balaams Character, 655 

consideration, and pardons them for the same. Such a doc- 
trine never could have succeeded if the desire and belief were 
not in man already. What Balaam was doing in this prayer 
was simply purchasing an indulgence to sin. 

2. The second stage is a state of hideous contradictions-, 
God .permits Balaam to go, and then is angry with him for 
going. There is nothing here which can not be interpreted 
by bitter experience. We must not explain it away by say* 
ing that these were only the alternations of Balaam's own 
mind. They were ; but they were the alternations of a mind 
with which God was expostulating, and to which God ap- 
peared differently at different times ; the horrible mazes and 
inconsistencies of a spirit which contradicts itself, and strives 
to disobey the God whom yet it feels and acknowledges. 
To such a state of mind God becomes a contradiction. 
" With the froward " — oh, how true ! — " thou wilt show thy- 
self fro ward." God speaks once, and if that voice be not 
heard, but is willfully silenced, the second time it utters a 
terrible permission. God says, " Go," and then is angry. 
Experience will tell us how God has sent us to reap the fruit 
of our own willfulness. 

3. We notice next the evidences in him of a disordered 
daind and heart. 

We come now to the most difficult portion of the story : 
*' The dumb ass, speaking with man's voice, forbade the mad- 
ness of the prophet." One of the most profound and pious 
of modern commentators on this passage has not scrupled 
to represent the whole transaction as occurring in a vis- 
ion. Others have thought that Balaam's own heart, smiting 
him for his cruelty, put, as it were, words into the ass's 
mouth. 

We care not. Let the caviller cavil if he will. There is 
too much profound truth throughout this narrative for us 
to care much about either the literal or the figurative inter- 
pretation. One thing, however, is clear. Balaam did only 
what men so entangled always do. The real fault is in 
themselves. They have committed themselves to a false 
position, and when obstacles stand in their way, they lay the 
blame on circumstances. They smite the dumb innocent oc- 
casion of their perplexity as if it were the cause. And the 
passionateness — the "madness" of the act is but an indica- 
tion that all is going wrong within. There was a canker at 
the heart of Balaam's life and his equanimity was gone ; his 
temper vented itself on brute things. Who has not seen the 
like — a grown man, unreasoning as a child, furious beyond 
the occasion ? If you knew the whole, you would see that 



656 Perversion, as shown in Balaam's Character. 

was not the thing which had moved him so terribly ; you 
would see that all was wrong inwardly. 

It is a strange, sad picture this. The first man in the 
land, gifted beyond most others, conscious of great mental 
power, going on to splendid prospects, yet with hopelessness 
and misery working at his heart. Who would have envied 
Balaam if he could have seen all — the hell that was working 
at his heart ? 

) Lastly, let us consider the impossibility under such circum- 
stances of going back. Balaam offers to go back. The an- 
gel says, " Go on." There was yet one hope for him — to be 
true, to utter God's words careless of the consequences ; but 
he who had been false so long, how should he be true ? It 
was too late. In the ardor of youth you have made perhaps 
a wrong choice, or chosen an unfit profession, or suffered 
yourself weakly and passively to be drifted into a false course 
of action, and now, in spite of yourself, you feel there is no 
going back. To many minds, such a lot comes as with the 
mysterious force of a destiny. They see themselves driven, 
and forget that they put themselves in the way of the stream 
that drives them. They excuse their own acts as if they 
were coerced. They struggle now and then faintly, as Ba- 
laam did — try to go back — can not — and at last sink passive- 
ly in the mighty current that floats them on to wrong. 

And thenceforth to them all God's intimations will come 
unnaturally. His voice will sound as that of an angel 
against them in the way. Spectral lights will gleam, only 
to show a quagmire from which there is no path of extrica- 
tion. The heavenliest things and the meanest will forbid 
the madness of the prophet : and yet at the same time seem 
to say to the weak and vacillating self-seeker, "You have 
done wrong, and you must do more wrong." Then deepens 
down a hideous, unnatural, spectral state — the incubus as of 
a dream of hell, mixed with bitter reminiscences of heaven. 

Your secret faults will come out in your life. Therufore^ 
tt^e say to you — be true. 



Selfishness, as shown in Balaams Character, 657 



SELFISHNESS, AS SHOWIST IN BALAAM'S 
CHARACTER. 

*' Who can count the dust of Jacob, and the number of the fourth part o! 
Israel ? Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like 
his ! " — Num. xxiii. 10. 

We acquainted ourselves with the earlier part of Balaam's 
history last Sunday. We saw how great gifts in him were 
perverted by ambition and avarice — ambition making them 
subservient to the admiration of himself; avarice transform- 
ing them into mere instruments for accumulating wealth. 
And we saw how his conscience was gradually perverted by 
insincerity, till his mind became the place of hideous contra- 
dictions, and even God Himself had become to him a lie ; 
with his heart disordered, until the bitterness of all going 
wrong within vented itself on innocent circumstances, and 
he found himself so entangled in a false course that to go 
back was impossible. 

Now we come to the second stage. He has been with 
Balak : he has built his altars, offered his* sacrifices, and tried 
his enchantments, to ascertain whether Jehovah will permit 
him to curse Israel. And the Voice in his heart, through all, 
says, " Israel is blest." He looks down from the hill-top, and 
sees the fair camp of Israel afar off, in beautiful array, their 
white tents gleaming " as the trees of lignaloes which the 
Lord had planted." He feels the solitary grandeur of a na- 
tion unlike all other nations — people which "shall dwell 
alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations." A na- 
tion too numberless to give Balak any hope of success in 
the coming war. " Who can count the dust of Jacob, and 
the number of the fourth part of Israel?" A nation too 
strong in righteousness for idolaters and enchanters to cope 
with, " Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, neither 
is there any divination against Israel ?" Then follows a per- 
sonal ejaculation — " Let me die the death of the righteous, 
and let my last end be like his !" 

Now to prevent the possibility of misconception, or any 
supposition that Balaam was expressing words whose full 
significance he did not understand — that when he wag 
speaking of righteousness he had only a heviUien notion of 



65 S Selftskness^as shown in Balaam s Character, 

it — we refer to the sixth chapter of Micah,from the fifth 
verse. We will next refer to Numbers xxxi. 8, and Joshua 
xiii. 22, from whence it appears that he who desired to die 
the death of the righteous, died the death of the ungodly, 
and fell, not on the side of the Lord, but fighting against the 
Lord's cause. The first thing we find in this history of Ba- 
laam is an attempt to change the will of God. 

Let us clearly understand what was the meaning of all 
those reiterated sacrifices. 

1. Balaam wanted to please himself without displeasing 
God. The problem was how to go to Balak, and yet not 
offend God. He would have given worlds to get rid of his 
duties, and he sacrificed, not to learn what his duty was, but 
to get his duty altered. Now see the feeling that lay at the 
root of all this — that God is mutable. Yet of all men one 
would have thought that Balaam knew better, for had he 
not said, " God is not a man, that He should lie ; neither the 
son of man that He should repent : hath He said, and shall 
He not do it?" But when we look upon it, we see Balaam 
had scarcely any feeling higher than this — God is more in- 
flexible than man. Probably had he expressed the exact 
shade of feeling, he would have said, more obstinate. He 
thought that God had set his heart upon Israel, and that it 
was hard, yet not impossible, to alter this partiality. Hence 
he tries sacrifices to bribe, and prayers to coax, God. 

How deeply rooted this feeling is in human nature — this 
belief in God's mutability — you may see from the Romish 
doctrine of indulgences and atonements. The Romish Church 
permits crime for certain considerations. For certain con- 
siderations it teaches that God will forgive crimes. Atone- 
ments after, and indulgences before sin, are the same. But 
this Romish doctrine never could have succeeded, if the be- 
lief in God's mutability and the desire that He should be 
mutable, were not in man already. 

What Balaam was doing in these parables, and enchant- 
ments, and sacrifices, was simply purchasing an indulgence 
to sin ; in other words, it was an attempt to make the Eter- 
nal Mind change. What was wanting for Balaam to fee,* 
was this — God can not change. What he did feel was this 
—God will not change. There are many writers who teach 
that this and that is right because God has willed it. All 
discussion is cut short by the reply, God has determined it, 
therefore it is right. Now there is exceeding danger in this 
mode of thought, for a thing is not right because God has 
willed it, but God wills it because it is right. It is in this 
tone the Bible always speaks. Never, except in one obscure 



Selfishness, as shoum in Balaam^ s Character, 659 

passage, does the Bible seem to refer right and wrong to tlie 
sovereignty of God, and declare it a matter of will ; never 
does it imply that if He so chose, He could reverse evil and 
good. It says, " Is not my way equal ? are not your ways 
unequal ?" " Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right ?" 
was Abraham's exclamation in a kind of hideous doubt 
whether the Creator might not be on the eve of doing injus- 
tice. So the WiSAo^ justifies the ways of God to man. But it 
could not do so unless it admitted eternal laws, with which 
no will can interfere. Xay more, see what ensues from this 
mode of thought. If right is right because God wills it, then, 
if God chose. He could make injustice, and cruelty, and lying 
to be right. This is exactly what Balaam thought. If God 
could but be prevailed on to hate Israel, then for him to 
curse them would be right. And again : if power and sov- 
ereignty make right, then, supposing the Ruler were a demon, 
devilish hatred would be as right as now it is wrong. There 
is great danger in some of our present modes of thinking. It 
is a common thought that might makes right, but for us there 
is no rest, no rock, no sure footing, so long as we feel right 
and wrong are mere matters of will and decree. There is no 
safety, then, from these hankering feelings and wishes to alter 
God's decree. You are unsafe until you feel, " Heaven and 
earth may pass away, but God's word can not pass away." 

2. We notice, secondly, an attempt to blind himself One 
of the strangest leaves in the book of the human heart is 
here turned. We observe here perfect veracity with utter 
want of truth. Balaam was veracious. He will not deceive 
Balak. Nothing was easier than to get the reward by mut- 
tering a spell, knowing all the while that it would not work. 
Many a European has sold incantations to rich savages for 
jewels and curiosities, thus enriching himself by deceit. 
Now Balaam was not supernaturally Avithheld. That is a 
baseless assumption. Nothing withheld him but his con- 
science. No bribe on earth could induce Balaam to say a 
falsehood — to pretend a curse which was powerless — to get 
gold, dearly as he loved it, by a pretense. "If Balak would 
give me his house full of silver and gold, I can not go beyond 
the word of the Lord my God, to do less or more," was no 
mere fine saying, but the very truth. You might as soon 
have turned the sun from his course as induced Balaam to 
utter falsehood. 

Aud yet, with all this, there was utter truthlessness of 
heart. Balaam will not utter what is not true ; but he will 
blind himself so that he may not see the truth, and so spealj 
a lie, believing it to be the truth. 



66o Seljiskness, as shown in Balaam's Character, 

He will only speak the thing he feels ; but he is not careful 
to feel all that is true. He goes to another place, where the 
whole truth may not force itself upon his mind — to a hill 
where he shall not see the whole of Israel: from hill to hill 
for the chance of getting to a place where the truth may dis- 
appear. But there stands the stubborn fact — Israel is bless- 
ed ; and he will look at the fact in every way, to see if he 
can not get it into a position where it shall be seen no long- 
er. Ostrich-like ! 

Such a character is not so uncommon as, perhaps, we think. 
There is many a lucrative business which involves misery 
and wrong to those who are employed in it. The man would 
be too benevolent to put the gold in his purse if he knew of 
the misery. But he takes care not to know. There is many 
a dishonorable thing done at an election, and the principal 
takes care not to inquire. Many an oppression is exercised 
on a tenantry, and the landlord receives his rent and asks no 
questions. Or there is some situation which depends upon 
the holding of certain religious opinions, and the candidate 
has a suspicion that if he were to examine, he could not con- 
scientiously profess these opinions, and perchance he takes 
care not to examine. 

3. Failing in all these evil designs against Israel, Balaam 
tries his last expedient to ruin them, and that partially suc- 
ceeds. 

He recommends Balak to use the fascination of the daugh- 
ters of Moab to entice the Israelites into idolatry. (Num. 
xxxi. 15, 16. Rev. ii. 14). He has tried enchantments and 
sacrifices in vain to reverse God's will. He has tried in 
vain to think that will is reversed. It will not do. He feels 
at last that God has not beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither 
hath He seen perverseness in Israel. Now therefore, he 
tries to reverse the character of these favorites, and so to re- 
verse God's will. God will not curse the good ; therefore 
Balaam tries to make them wicked ; he tries to make the 
good curse themselves, and so exasperate God. 

A more diabolical wickedness we can scarcely conceive. 
Yet Balaam was an honorable man and a veracious man; 
nay, a man of delicate conscientiousness and unconquer- 
able scruples — a man of lofty religious professions, highly 
respectable and respected. The Lord of heaven and earth 
has said there is such a thing as " straining out a gnat, and 
swallowing a camel." 

There are men who would not play false, and yet would 
wrongly win. There are men who would not lie, and yet 
who would bribe a poor man to support a cause which he 



Selfishness, as shown in Balaam's Character. 66 1 

believes in his soul to be false. There are men who would 
resent at the sword's point the charge of dishonor, who 
would yet for selfish gratification entice the weak into sin, 
and damn body and soul in hell. There are men who would 
be shocked at being called traitors, who in time of war will 
yet make a fortune by selling arms to their country's foes. 
There are men respectable and respected, who give liberally 
and support religious societies, and go to church, and would 
not take God's name in vain, who have made wealth, in some 
trade of opium or spirits, out of the wreck of innumerable 
human lives. Balaam is one of the accursed spirits now, 
but he did no more than these are doing. 

Xow see what lay at the root of all this hollo wness : self- 
ishness. 

From first to last one thing appears uppermost in this his- 
tory — Balaam's self; — the honor of Balaam as a true proph- 
et — therefore he will not lie ; the wealth of Balaam — therC' 
fore the Israelites must be sacrificed. Xay more, even in 
his sublimest visions his egotism breaks out. In the sight 
of God's Israel he cries, " Let me die the death of the right- 
eous :" in anticipation of the glories of the eternal advent, 
"Z shall behold Him, but not nigh." He sees the vision of a 
kingdom, a Church, a chosen people, a triumph of righteous- 
ness. In such anticipations, the nobler prophets broke out 
into strains in which their own personality was forgotten. 
Moses, when he thought that God would destroy His people, 
prays in agony — " Yet now, if Thou wilt, forgive their sins ; 
— and if not, blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book." Paul 
speaks in impassioned words — "I have continual sorrow in 
my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from 
Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, 
who are Israelites." But Balaam's chief feeling seems to be, 
"How will all this advance mef^ And the magnificence of 
the prophecy is thus marred by a chord of melancholy and 
diseased egotism. Xot for one moment — even in those mo- 
ments when uninspired men gladly forget themselves; men 
who have devoted themselves to a monarchy or dreamed of 
a republic in sublime self-abnegation — can Balaam forget 
himself in God's cause. 

Observe, then : desire for personal salvation is not religion. 
It may go with it, but it is not religion. Anxiety for the 
state of one's own soul is not the healthiest or best symp- 
tom. Of course every one wishes, " Let me die the death of 
the righteous." But it is one thing to wish to be saved, an- 
other to wish God's right to triumph ; one thing to wish to 
die safe, another to wish to live holily. Nay, not onljy is 



662 Selfishness, as shown in Balaam's Character, 

this desire for persooal salvation not religion, but if soured, 
it passes into hatred of the good. Balaam's feeling became 
spite against the people who are to be blessed when he is 
not blessed. He indulges a wish that good may not pros- 
per, because personal interests are mixed up with the failure 
of good. 

• We see anxiety about human opinion is uppermost. 
Throughout we find in Balaam's character semblances, not 
realities. He would not transgress a rule, but he would vio- 
late a principle. He would not say white was black, but he 
would sully it till it looked black. 

l!^ow consider the whole. 

A bad man prophesies under the fear of God, restrained 
by conscience, full of poetry and sublime feelings, with a full 
clear view of death as dwarfing life, and the blessedness of 
righteousness as compared with wealth. And yet we find 
him striving to disobey God, hollow and unsound at heart ; 
using for the devil wisdom, and gifts bestowed by God ; 
sacrificing all with a gambler's desperation, for name and 
wealth : tempting a nation to sin, and crime, and ruin ; sepa- 
rated in selfish isolation from all mankind ; superior to Balak, 
and yet feeling that Balak knew him to be a man that had 
his price ; with the bitter anguish of being despised by the 
men who were inferior to himself; forced to conceive of a 
grandeur in which he had no share, and a righteousness in 
which he had no part. Can you not conceive the end of one 
with a mind so torn and distracted ? — the death in battle ; 
the insane frenzy with which he would rush into the field, 
and finding all go against him, and that lost for which he 
bad bartered heaven, after having died a thousand worse 
than deaths, find death at last upon the spears of the Israel- 
ites ? 

In application, we remark: 1st. The danger of great pow- 
ers. It is an awful thing, this conscious power to see more, 
to feel more, to know more than our fellows. 

2d. But let us mark well the difference between feeling 
and doing. 

It is possible to have sublime feelings, great passions, even 
great sympathies with the race, and yet not to love man. 
To feel mightily, is one thing, to live truly and charitably, 
another. Sin may be felt at the core, and yet not be cast 
out. Brethren, beware. See how a man may be going on 
uttering fine words, orthodox truths, and yet be rotten at 
the heart. 



The Tra7isitoriness of Life, 663 



VI. 
THE TRANSITORINESS OF LIFE. 

*'So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts untQ 
msdom." — Psahn xc. 12. 

This is the key-note of the 90th Psalm. It numbers sadly 
the days and vicissitudes of human life ; but it does this, not 
for the sake of mere sentiment, but rather for practical pur- 
poses, that it may furnish a motive for a vriser life of the 
heart. We know nothing of the Psalm except that it was 
the composition of "Moses, the man of God." It was writ- 
ten evidently in the wilderness, after years of apparently 
fruitless wandering : its tone is that of deep sadness — re- 
trospective ; its images are borrowed from the circumstances 
of the pilgrimage — the mountain-flood, the grass, the night- 
watch of an army on the march. 

See here, again, what is meant by inspiration. Observe 
the peculiarly human character of this Psalm. Moses, " the 
man of God," is commissioned not to tell truths superhuman, 
but truths emphatically human. The utterances of this 
Psalm are true to nature. Moses felt as we feel, only God 
gave him a voice to interpret, and he felt more deeply than 
all, what all in their measure feel. His inspiration lay not 
in this, that he was gifted with legislative wisdom ; but 
rather in this, that his bosom vibrated truly and healthfully 
to every note of the still sad music of humanity. We will 
consider — 

L The feelings suggested by a retrospect of the past. 
II. The right direction of those feelings. 

1. The analogies of nature which correspond with human 
life. All the images in this Psalm are suggested by the cir- 
cumstances of their forty years' pilgrimage. Human life felt 
to be like a flood — the withering grass — a sleep broken — the 
pain — the start — death — the awakening — a night-watch — a 
tale told, whose progress we watched with interest, but of 
which when done the impression alone remains, the words 
are gone forever. These are not artificial images, but natu- 
ral. They are not similes forced by the writer into his serv- 
ice because of their prettiness, but similes which forced 
themselves on him by their truthfulness. Now this is God's 



664 The Transitoriness of Life. 

arrangement. All things here are double. The world with 
out corresponds with the world within. No man could look 
on a stream when alone by himself, and all noisy companion- 
ship overpowering good thoughts was away, without the 
thought that just so his own particular current of life will 
fall at last into the " unfathomable gulf where all is still." 

No man can look upon a field of corn, in its yellow ripe- 
ness, which he has passed weeks before when it was green, 
or a convolvulus withering as soon as plucked, without ex- 
periencing a chastened feeling of the fleetingness of all earth- 
ly things. 

No man ever went through a night-watch in the bivouac, 
when the distant hum of men and the random shot fired told 
of possible death on the morrow ; or watched in a sick-room, 
when time was measured by the sufierer's breathing or the 
intolerable ticking of the clock, without a firmer grasp on 
the realities of life and time. 

So God walks His appointed rounds through the year : and 
every season and every sound has a special voice for the va- 
rying phases of our manifold existence. Spring comes, when 
earth unbosoms her mighty heart to God, and anthems of 
gratitude seem to ascend from every created thing. It is 
something deeper than an arbitrary connection which com- 
pels us to liken this to the thought of human youth. 

And then comes summer, with its full stationariness, its 
noontide heat, its dust, and toil, an emblem of ripe manhood. 
The interests of youth are gone by. The interest of a near 
grave has not yet come. Its duty is work. And afterwards 
autumn, with its mournfulness, its pleasant melancholy, tells 
us of coming rest and quiet calm. 

And now has come winter again. This is the last Sunday 
in the year. 

It is not a mere preacher's voice performing an allotted 
task. The call and correspondence are real. The young 
have felt the melancholy of the last two months. With a 
transient feeling — even amounting to a luxury — the prophet- 
ic soul within us anticipates with sentiment the real gloom 
of later life, and enables us to sympathize with what we have 
not yet experienced. The old have felt it as no mere ro- 
mance — an awful fact — a correspondence between the world 
without and the world within. We have all felt it in the 
damp mist, in the slanting shadows, the dimmer skies, the 
pale, watery glow of the red setting sun, shorn of half its 
lustre. In the dripping of the woodland, in the limp leaves 
trodden by heaps into clay, in the depressing north wind, in 
the sepulchral cough of the aged man at the corner of the 



The Transitoriness of Life. 665 

street under the inclement sky, God has said to us, as He 
said to Moses, " Pause, and number thy days, for they are 
numbered." 

2. There is also a sense of loss. Every sentence tells us 
that this Psalm was written after a long period was past. 
It was retrospective, not prospective. Moses is looking 
back, and his feeling is loss. How much was lost ? Into 
that flood of time how much had fallen ? Many a one con- 
sumed, like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, by the wrath of 
God. Many a Hebrew warrior stricken in battle, and over 
him a sand-heap. And those who remembered these things 
were old men — " consuming^'' his strong expression, " their 
strength in labor and sorrow." 

Such is life ! At first, all seems given. We are acquiring 
associations, sensations, new startling feelings ; then comes 
the time when all give pleasure or pain by association — by 
touching some old chord which vibrates again. And after 
that, all is loss — something gone, and more is going. Every 
day, every year — this year, like all others. Into that flood 
have fallen treasures that will not be recovered. Intimacies 
have been dissolved that will not be reunited. Affections 
cooled, we can not say why. Many a ship foundered, and 
the brave hearts in her will be seen no more till the sea shall 
give up her dead. Many a British soldier fallen before 
Asiatic pestilence, or beneath the Kafiir assegai, above him 
the bush or jungle is waving green, but he himself is now 
where the rifle's ring is heard, and the sabre's glitter is seen, 
no more. Many a pew before me is full, which at the begin- 
ning of the year was filled by others. Many a hearth-stone 
is cold, and many a chair is empty that will not be filled 
again. We stand upon the shore of that illimitable sea 
which never restores what has once fallen into it ; we hear 
only the boom of the waves that throb over all — forever. 

3. There is, too, an apparent non-attainment. 

A deeper feeling pervades this Psalm than that of mere 
transitoriness : it is that of the impotency of human effort. 
" We are consumed " — perish aimlessly like the grass. No 
man was more likely to feel this than Moses. After forty 
years, the slaves he had emancipated were in heart slaves 
still — idolators. He called them rebels, and shattered the 
stone tables of the law, in sad and bitter disappointment. 
After forty years the promised land was not reached. He 
himself never entered it, 

Xo wonder if life appeared to him like a stream, not mere- 
ly transitory, but monotonous. Generation after generation, 
and no change; much lost, apparently nothing was won. K<? 



666 The Transitoriness of Life, 

prospect of better time had been. " The thing that hath 
been, it is that which shall be." Here, too, is one of the great 
trials of all retrospect — the great trial of all eai'thly life. 

The cycles of God's providences are so large that our nar- 
row lives scarcely measure a visible portion of them. So 
large that we ask, What can we effect ? Yet there is an al- 
most irrepressible wish in our hearts to see success attend our 
labors, to enter the promised land in our own life. It is a 
hard lesson : to toil in faith and to die in the wilderness, not 
having attained the promises, but only seeing them afar off. 

So in the past year, personally and publicly. Personally 
we dare not say that we are better than we were at the be- 
ginning. Can we say that we are purer? more earnest? 
Has the lesson of the cross been cut sharply into our hearts ? 
Have we only learned self-denial, to say nothing of self-sacri- 
fice ? And stagnation thus being apparently the case, or at 
most but very slow progress, the thought comes. Can such 
beings be destined for immortality ? 

On a larger scale, the young cries of freedom which caused 
all generous hearts to throb with sympathy have been stifled; 
itself trodden down beneath the iron heel of despotism all 
over Europe and rendered frantic and ferocious. Can we 
wish for its success ? Are the better times coming at all ? 
So does the heart sicken over the past. Every closing year 
seems to say. Shall we begin the old useless struggle over 
again ? Shall we tell again the oft-told tale ? Are not these 
hopes, so high, a mockery to a moth like man ? Is all but a 
mere illusion, a mirage in the desert? Are the waters of 
life and home ever near, yet never reached, and the dry hot 
desert sand his only attainment ? 

Let us consider — 

n. The right use of these sad suggestions. *' So teach us 
to number our days." 

" So," because the days may be numbered, as in this Psalm, 
and the heart not applied to wisdom. There are two ways 
in which days may be numbered to no purpose. 

1. That of the Epicurean — "Let us eat and drink; for to- 
morrow we die." There is a strong tendency to reckless en- 
joyment when the time is felt to be short, and religion does 
not exist to restrain. 

[For example. In times of plague — Athens — Milan — Lon- 
don — danger only stimulates men to seize to-day the enjoy- 
ments which may not be theirs to-morrow. Again, at the 
close of the last century, when the prisons of Paris resounded 
with merriment, dance, and acting, a light and trivial people, 



The Transitoriness of Life. 667 

atheists at heart, could extract from an hourly impending 
death no deeper lesson than this, " Let us eat and drink ; for 
to-morrow we die."] 

2. That of the sentimentalist. 

It is no part of our Christian duty to think of decay in an 
abject spirit. That which the demoniac in the Gospels did, 
having his dwelling among the tombs, has sometimes been 
reckoned the perfection of Christian unworldliness. Men 
have looked on every joy as a temptation ; on every earnest 
pursuit as a snare — the skull and the hour-glass their com- 
panions, curtaining life with melancholy, haunting it with 
visions and emblems of mortality. This is not Christianity. 

Rather it is so to dwell on the thoughts of death " that we 
may apply our hearts unto wisdom." If the history of these 
solemn truths does not stimulate us to duty and action, it 
were no duty to remind ourselves of them. Rather the re- 
verse. Better shut out such gloomy and useless thoughts. 
But there is a way of dwelling amidst these facts which sol- 
emnizes life instead of paralyzing it. He is best prepared to 
meet change who sees it at a distance and contemplates it 
calmly. Affections are never deepened and refined until the 
possibility of loss is felt. Duty is done with all energy, then 
only, when we feel, " The night cometh, when no man can 
work," in all its force. 

Two thoughts are presented to make this easier. 

1. The eternity of God. "Before the mountains were 
brought forth, even from everlasting to everlasting. Thou art 
God." With God there Is no Time — it is one eternal Now, 
This is made conceivable to us by a recent writer, who has re- 
minded us that there are spots in the universe which have 
not yet been reached by the beams of light which shone from 
this earth at its creation. If, therefore, we are able on an 
angel's wings to reach that spot in a second or two of time, 
the sight of this globe would be just becoming visible as it 
was when chaos passed into beauty. A few myriads of miles 
nearer, we should be met by the picture of the world in the 
state of deluge. And so in turn would present themselves 
the spectacles of patriarchal life ; of Assyrian, Grecian, Per- 
sian, Roman civilization ; and, at a short distance from the 
earth, the scenes of yesterday. Thus a mere transposition in 
space would make the past present. And thus, all that we 
need is the annihilation of space to annihilate time. So that 
if we conceive a Being present everywhere in space, to Him 
all past events would be present. At the remotest extremi- 
ty of the angel's journey, he would see the world's creation i 



668 The Transitoriness of Life. 

at this extremity, the events that pass before our eyes l^ 
day. Omnipresence in space is thus equivalent to ubiquity 
in time. And to such a being, demonstrably, there would be 
no Time. All would be one vast eternal Now. 

Apply this to practical wisdom. And this comes in to 
correct our despondency. For with God, " a thousand years 
are as one day." In the might j^ cycles in which God works, 
our years and ages are moments. It took fifteen hundred 
years to educate the Jewish nation. We wonder that Moses 
saw nothing in forty years. But the thought of the eternity 
of God w^as his consolation. And so, shall we give up our 
hopes of heaven and progress, because it is so slow, when we 
remember that God has innumerable ages before Him ? Or 
our hopes for our personal improvement, when we recollect 
our immortality in Him who has been our refuge " from 
generation to generation ?" Or for our schemes and plans 
which seem to fail, w^hen we remember that they will grow 
after us, like the grass above our graves ? 

n. Next, consider the permanence of results. Read the 
conclusion of the Psalm, " Prosper Thou the work of our 
hands upon us, oh prosper Thou our handiwork." It is a 
bright conclusion for a Psalm so dark and solemn. To cor- 
rect the gloom that comes from brooding on decay, it is 
good to remember that there is a sense in which nothing 
perishes. 

1. The permanence of our past seasons. Spring, summer, 
autumn, are gone, but the harvest is gathered in. Youth and 
manhood are passed, but their lessons have been learnt. The 
past is ours only when it is gone. We do n9t understand the 
meaning of our youth, our joys, our sorrows, till we look at 
them from a distance. We lose them to get them back again 
in a deeper way. The past is our true inheritance, which 
nothing can take from us. Its sacred lessons, its pure affec- 
tions, are ours forever. Nothing but the annihilation of our 
being could rob us of them. 

2. The permanence of lost affections. Over the departed 
ones Moses mourned. But take his own illustration — "A 
tale that is told." The sound and words are gone, but the 
tale is indelibly imj^ressed on the heart. So the lost are not 
really lost. Perhaps they are ours only truly when lost. 
Their patience, love, wisdom, are sacred now, and live in us. 
The apostles and prophets are more ours than they were the 

Eroperty of the generation who saw their daily life — " He 
eing dead, yet speaketh." 

3. The permanence of our own selves — " The beauty of 



The Transitoriness of Life. 669 

the Lord our God be upon us." Yery striking this. We 
survive. We are what the past has made us. The results 
of the past are ourselves. The perishable emotions, and 
the momentary acts of bygone years, are the scaffolding on 
which we build up the being that we are. As the tree is 
fertilized by its own broken branches and fallen leaves, and 
grows out by its own decay, so is the soul of man ripened 
out of broken Ijopes and blighted affections. The law of our 
humanity is the common law of the universe — life out of 
death, beauty out of decay. Xot till those fierce young 
passions, over the decay of which the old man grieves, have 
been stilled into silence ; not until the eye has lost its fire, 
and the cheek its hot flush, can " the beauty of the Lord our 
God be upon us" — the beauty of a spirit subdued, chastened, 
and purified by loss. 

4. Let us correct these sad thoughts by the thought of the 
permanence of work. " Prosper thou the v^ork of our hands." 
Feelings pass, thoughts and imaginations pass : dreams pass : 
work remains. Through eternity, what you have done, that 
you are. They tell us that not a sound has ever ceased to 
vibrate through space ; that not a ripple has ever been lost 
upon the ocean. Much more is it true that, not a true 
thought, nor a pure resolve, nor a loving act, has ever gone 
forth in vain. 

So then we will end our year. 

Amidst the solemn lessons taught to the giddy traveller 
as he journeys on by a Nature hastening with gigantic foot- 
steps down to a winter grave, and by the solemn tolling of 
the bell of Time, which tells us that another, and another, 
and another, is gone before us, we will learn, not the lesson 
of the sensualist — enjoy while you can : not that of the feeble 
sentimentalist — mourn, for nothing lasts: but that of the 
Christian — work cheerfully. 

" The beauty of the Lord our God be upon us." 

^ Oh, prosper Thou our handiwork." 



670 Visws of Death, 



vn 

VIEWS OF DEATH. 

**Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happenetil 
even to me ; and why was I then more wise ? Then I said in my heart, 
that this also is vanity. For there is no remembrance of the wise more than 
of the fool forever ; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be 
forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool." — Eccles. ii. 15, 16. 

This is the inspired record of a peculiar view of life. 
Paul, with his hopefulness of disposition, could not have 
written it, neither could John, with his loving, trustful spirit. 
We involuntarily ask who wrote this ? Was it written by a 
voluptuary — a skeptic — or a philosopher? What sort of 
man was it ? 

We detect the sated voluptuary in the expressions of the 
first eleven verses of this chapter. We see the skeptic in 
those of the 19th to the 22d verses of the third chapter. 
And the philosopher, who in avoidance of all extremes seeks 
the golden medium, is manifested in such a maxim as " Be 
not righteous overmuch ; neither make thyself overwise : 
why shouldest thou destroy thyself? Be not overmuch 
wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldest thou die 
before thy time ?" Or was it written by a man deeply and 
permanently inspired ? 

I believe it to have been written by none of these, or 
rather by all four. It records different experiences of the 
same mind — different moods in which he viewed life in 
different ways. It is difficult to interpret, or to separate 
them ; for he says nothing by which they can be marked off 
and made distinct from each other. Nowhere does Solomon 
say, " I thought so then, but that was only a mood, a phase 
of feeling that I have since seen was false, and is now cor- 
rected by the experience and expressions of the present." 
Here is, at first sight, nothing but inextricable confusion and 
false conclusions. 

The clue to the whole is to be found in the interpreter's 
own heart. It is necessary to make these few preliminary 
remarks, as there is a tone of disappointment which runs 
through all this book, which is not the tone of the Bible 
in general. Two lines of thought are suggested by the 
text. 



Views of Death. 671 

L The mysterious aspect presented by death. 
II. That state of heart in which it is mysterious no 
longer. 

I. To Solomon, in his mood of darkness, " there is no re^ 
membrance of the wise more than of the fool forever." But 
it is not only in moods of dark perplexity, it is always a 
startling thing to see the rapidity with which the wisest and 
the best are forgotten. We plough our lives in water, leav- 
ing no furrow ; two little waves break upon the shore, but no 
further vestige of our existence is left. 

[An accident happens to one of England's greatest sons ; 
an announcement is made which stagnates the blood in a 
country's veins for a moment, and then all returns to its 
former channel. — (Tennyson. " In Memoriam." " Let them 
rave," he sleeps well.) 

Country church-yard — yew-tree — upheaving roots clasping 
round bones — a striking fact that vegetable life outlives and 
outlasts animal life.] 

There is something exquisitely painful in the thought that 
we die out and are forgotten ; therefore it is, that in the 
higher walks of life people solace themselves with the hope 
of posthumous reputation ; they think, perhaps, that then 
only their true worth will be known. That posthumous 
reputation ! when the eye is forever closed, and the heart 
forever chilled here — what matters it to him, whether storms 
rage over his grave or men cherish his memory ? he sleeps 
w^ell. The commentators on this book have disagreed among 
themselves about Solomon's character — ■ some have even 
doubted whether he was finally saved or no. What matters 
it to him now what is said of him ? what does it signify to 
him what posterity thinks of him ? And so with us all : to 
the ear that is turned into dust the voice of praise or of cen- 
sure is indifferent. One thing is certain. God says, " Time 
is short, eternity is long." The solemn tolling of the bell 
seems to cry. There is something to be done ; there is much 
to be done ; do it ! and that quickly ! 

Then again there are some who say, " What use is there 
in doing any thing in this world ? It scarcely seems worth 
while, in this brief span of life, to try do any thing." A 
man is placed in a high situation, receives an expensive ed- 
ucation at school and college, and a still more expensive one 
of time and experience. And then, just when we think all 
this ripe wisdom, garnered up from so many fields, shall find 
its fullest use, we hear that all is over, he has passed from 



672 Views 0/ Death, 

among us, and then the question, hideous in its suggestive* 
ness, arises, " Why was he then more wise ?" 

Asked from this world's stand-point — if there is no life 
beyond the grave, if there is no immortality, if all spiritual 
calculation is to end here, why, then the mighty work of 
God is all to end in nothingness : but if this is only a state 
of infancy, only the education for eternity, in which the soul 
is to gain its wisdom and experience for higher work, then 
to ask why such a mind is taken from us is just as absurd as 
to question why the tree of the forest has its first training in 
the nursery garden. This is but the nursery ground, from 
whence we are to be transplanted into the great forest of 
God's eternal universe. There is an absence of all distinc- 
tion between the death of one man and another. The wise 
man dies as the fool with respect to circumstances. 

In our short-sightedness we think there ought to be a cer- 
tain correspondence between the man and the mode of the 
man's death. We fancy the warrior should die upon the 
battle-plain, the statesman at his post, the mean man should 
die in ignorance : but it is not so ordered in God's world, for 
the wise man dies as the fool, the profligate man dies as the 
hero. Sometimes for the great and wise is reserved a con- 
temptuous death, a mere accident ; then^ he who is not sat- 
isfied unless the external reality corresponds with the in- 
ward hope, imagines that circumstances such as these can 
not be ordained by Eternal Love, but rather by the spirit 
of a mocking demon. 

There is always a disappointment of our expectations. 
N^o man ever lived whose acts w^ere not smaller than him- 
self We often look forward to the hour of death in which a 
man shall give vent to his greater and nobler emotions. 
The hour comes, and the wise man dies as the fool. In the 
fix-st place, in the case of holiness and humbleness, thoughts 
of deep despondency and dark doubt often gather round the 
heart of the Christian in his last hour, and the narrow-minded 
man interprets that into God's forgetfulness ; or else deliri- 
um shrouds all in silence ; or else there are only common- 
place words, words tender, touching, and gentle, but in 
themselves nothing. Often there is nothing that marks the 
great man from the small m^n. This is the mystery of 
death. 

n. It depends on causes within us and not without us. 
Three things are said by the man of pleasure : — 1. That all 
things happen by chance. 2. That there is nothing new. 
3, That all is vanity, and nothing is stable. 



Views of Death, 673 

There is a strange special penalty which God annexes to 
a life of pleasure : Every thing appears to the worldly 
man as a tangled w^eb — a maze to which there is no clue. 
Another man says, " There is nothing new under the sun." 
This is the state of the man who lives merely for excitement 
and pleasure — his heart becomes so jaded, by excitement that 
the world contains nothing for him which can awaken fresh 
or new emotions. Then, again, a third says, "All is vanity." 
This is the state of him who is afloat on the vast ocean of ex- 
citement, and who feels that life is nothing but a fluctua- 
ting, changeful, heartless scene. 

Some who read the Book of Ecclesiastes think that there 
is a sadness and uneasiness in its tone inconsistent wdth the 
idea of ins])iration — that it is nothing but a mere kaleido' 
scope, w4th endlessly shifting moods. Therein lies the proof 
of its inspiration. Its value lies as much in the way of warn- 
ing as of precept. Live for yourself here — live the mere life 
of pleasure, and then all is confusion and bew^ilderment of 
mind ; then the view which the mighty mind of Solomon 
took, inspired by God, will be yours : life will seem as noth- 
ing, and death a mere mockery. Be in harmony wath the 
mind of Christ, have the idea He had, be one with Him, and 
you shall understand the machinery of this w^orld. " The 
secret of the Lord is wdth them that fear Him." To the 
humble pious heart there is no mystery. The world is intel- 
ligible only to a mind in harmony with the Mind that made 
it. Else all is confusion, unless you are in possession of His 
idea, moved by His Spirit. 

Hence it lies in a pure heart much more than in a clear 
intellect, to understand the mystery of life and death. Solo* 
mon's wisdom has left us only a confused idea. 

Turn we now from the views of Solomon to the life of the 
Son of Man. Men asked, "How knoweth this man letters, 
having never learned ?" He gave a diflerent explanation of 
His wisdom. "My judgment is just; because I seek not 
mine owm will, but the will of the Father which hath sent 
me." 

He gives directions to us how to gain the same discern- 
ment. " If any man will do His will, he shall know." 

[One has just been taken from us to whom all eyes turned 
>^Sif Robert Peel.] 



674 Waiting for the Second Advent, 



vin. 
WAITING FOR THE SECOND ADVENT. 

*' And the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God, and into the pa. 
tient waiting for Christ." — 2 Thess. iii. 5. 

The two Epistles to the Thessalonians contain, more ex- 
pressly than any other, St. Paul's views respecting the sec- 
ond Advent of Christ. The first epistle was written to cor- 
rect certain enthusiastic views respecting that coming. But 
the second epistle tells us that the efibrt had failed. For in 
the mean while, another epistle had been forged in St. Paul's 
name, asserting that the day was near, and so opening the 
floodgates of fanaticism. To counteract this, he tells them 
not to be shaken in mind by any word or letter as from him, 
as that the day of Christ was at hand. And, contrary to his 
usual practice, he writes the salutation at the close with his 
own hand, making it a test hereafter of the genuineness of 
his epistles. 

Let us try to paint a picture of the state of the Thessalo- 
nian Church. Such phenomena had appeared as might have 
been expected to arise from a belief that the end of the 
world was near. Men forsook their stated employments ; 
the poor would not work, but expected to be maintained by 
their richer brethren. Men, being idle, spent their time in 
useless discussions, neglected their own affairs, gossipped, 
and indulged a prying curiosity into the affairs of others. 
Hence arose the necessity for the admonition — " Study to be 
quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your 
hands, as we commanded you ;" and so the apostle had 
said, " Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our 
Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every 
brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition 
which he received of us. For yourselves know how ye 
ought to follow us : for we behaved not ourselves disorderly 
among you ; neither did we eat any man's bread for nought; 
but wrought with labor and travail night and day, that we 
might not be chargeable to any of you." 

Moreover, two opposite lines of conduct were adopted by 
persons of different temperament. Some greedily received 
every wild tale and mysterious prediction of the Advent, 
and listened eagerly to every fanatic who could work upon 



Waiting for the Second Advent, 075 

the vulgar credulity. Others, perceiving that there was so 
much imposture, concluded that it was safest to believe noth* 
ing ; and accordingly were skeptical of every claim to inspi- 
ration. In admonition of the first class, St. Paul says, " Prove 
all things ; hold fast that which is good." In admonition of 
the second," Quench not the Spirit. Despise not prophesy- 
ings." 

The opposite tendencies of skepticism and credulity will 
be found very near together in all ages. Some men refusing 
to believe that God speaks in the signs of the times ; others 
running after every book on prophecy, seeking after signs, 
believing in miracles and imposture, mesmerisms, electro-biol- 
ogies, winking pictures — any thing provided it be marvellous 
— it is the same state of mind exactly ! 

To meet the evil of this feverish, disturbed state of the 
Thessalonian Church, St. Paul takes two grounds. He first 
points out the signs which will precede the second Advent : 
Self-idolatry, excluding the worship of God. Sinful human- 
ity, " the man of sin," in the temple of God. And this self- 
worship deceiving by a show of godliness, and a power ap- 
parently miraculous (such as our present self-laudations, phi- 
lanthropies, marvellous triumphs as with Divine power, over 
the material world). Besides this, punishment of falsehood 
on the rejection of the true. These signs worked then and 
now. St. Paul discerned the general law of Christ's king- 
dom and its development as applicable to all epochs down 
to the last. But next, St. Paul called the Church away from 
this feverishness to the real preparation for the Advent. 
The Church was on the tiptoe of expectation, and prepared 
in the way above described. St. Paul summons them to a 
real but not excited preparation. And this in two things : 
— 1. The love of God. 2. Patience of the saints. We con- 
sider — 

I. Preparation for the Redeemer's coming: the love of 
God. 

1. The love of God is the love of goodness. The old Sax- 
on word God is identical with Good. God the Good One — 
personified goodness. There is in that derivation not a mere 
play of words — there is a deep truth. None loves God but 
he who loves good. To love God is to love what God is. 
God is pure, and he who loves purity can love God. God is 
true. God is just ; and he who loves these things out of 
God may love them in God ; and God for them, because He 
is good, and true, and pure, and just. 

No other love is real 2 none else lasts. For example, love 



676 Waitmg for the Second Advent, 

based on a belief of personal favors will not endure. You 
may be very happy, and believe that God has made you 
happy. While that happiness lasts you will love God. But 
a time comes when happiness goes. You will not be always 
young and prosperous. A time may come when misfortunes 
will accumulate on you as on Job. At last, Job had nothing 
left but life. The natural feeling would be, " Curse God and 
die." Job said, " Though He slay me, yet will I trust in 
Him." Plainly Job had some other reason for his love than 
personal favors. God, the all-pure, all-just, all-holy, adorable, 
because all-holy. Or again, you believe that Christ's suffer- 
ings have purchased heaven for you. Well, you are grate- 
ful. But suppose your evidence of personal salvation fades, 
what then ? 

Here, however, let me make a remark. The love of good- 
ness only becomes real by doing good. Without this it re- 
mains merely a sickly sentiment. It gets body and reality 
by acting. For example, we have been prating since the 
Great Duke's death, of duty. Know we not that by merely 
talking of duty our profession of admiration for duty will 
become a cant ? This is a truth a minister of Christ feels 
deeply. It is his business to be talking to others of self-sac- 
rifice and devotedness. He of all men feels how little these 
words mean, unless they are acted out. For an indolent 
habit of admiring goodness is got easily, and is utterly with- 
out profit. Hence Christ says, " Not every man that saith 
unto me. Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven ; 
but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven ;" 
and hence, too, " If a man love me, he will keep my com- 
mandments, and I will love him ;" " If ye know these things, 
happy are ye if ye do them ;" " This is the love of God, that 
we keep His commandments." The love of goodness is real 
and healthy only when we do it. 

2. The love of God is the love of man expanded and puri- 
fied. It is a deep truth that we can not begin with loving 
God, we must begin with loving man. It is an awful com- 
mand, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart 
and soul and mind." It is awful and impossible at first. 
Interrogate the child's conscience, he does not love God su- 
premely ; he loves his mother, and his sister, and his brother 
more. Now this is God's plan of nature. Our special hu- 
man affections are given us to expand into a diviner charity. 
We are learning "by a mortal yearning to ascend." Our 
affections wrap themselves round beings who are created in 
God's image; then they expand, widen in their range; be- 
come less absorbed, more calm, less passionate, more philan* 



Waiting for the Seco7id Advent. 677 

thropic. They become more pure, less selfish. Love was 
given, encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for this end — .... 
that self might be annulled. The testimony of St. John is 
decisive on this point. To him we appeal as to the apostle 
who knew best what love is. His love to God was unearth- 
ly, pure, spiritual ; his religion had melted into love. Let us 
listen to his account. " No man hath seen God at any time. 
If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is 
perfected in us ;" " He that loveth not his brother whom he 
hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen ?" 

According to him, the thought of the invisible God is in- 
tolerable. It would be shorn of its dazzling splendor by be- 
ing exhibited in our brethren. So we can gaze on the re- 
flected sunlight on the moon. According to him, it is 
through the visible that we appreciate the invisible — 
through the love of our brother that we grow into the love 
of God. 

An awful day is coming to us all — the day of Christ. A 
day of triumph, but of judgment too. Terrible language de- 
scribes it, " The sun shall be turned into darkness and the 
moon into blood." God shall be felt as He never has been 
yet. How shall we prepare for that august sight ? Not by 
unnatural, forced efibrts at loving Him whom no eye can see 
and live ; but by much persistence in the appointed path of 
our common affections, our daily intercourse, the talk man 
holds with man in the hourly walk of the world's inter- 
course. By being true to our attachments. Let not a hum- 
ble Christian be over-anxious, if his spiritual affections are 
not as keen as he would wish. The love of God is the full- 
blown flower of which the love of man is the bud. To love 
man is to love God. To do good to man will be recognized 
hereafter as doing good to Christ. These are the Judge's 
words : " Verily, I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it unto 
one of the least of these My brethren, ye did it unto Me.'* 

3. Personal affections. 

[Guard what is now said from any appearance of repre- 
senting it as actually attained by the person who describes 
it. The love of God is a fearful and a lovely thing ; but 
they wiio have reached it are the few.] 

It is not merely love of goodness, but love of goodness 
concentrated on the Good One. Not merely the love of 
man, but the love of man expanded into the love of Him, of 
whom all that we have seen of gentle and lovely, of true and 
tender, of honorable and bright in human character, are but 
the shadows and the broken, imperfect lights. 



678 Waiting for the Second Advent, 

It is here that the Jewish religion is the chief trainer of 
the w orld. Revelation began with the personality of God. 
All the Jew's discipline taught him this : that the law of 
right was the will of a law^giver. Deliverance from Egyp- 
tian slavery, or Assyrian invasion, was always associated 
with the name of a deliverer. Moses and the prophets w^ere 
His messengers and mediators. "Thus saith the Lord," is 
ever the preface of their message. 

Consequently, only from Jews, and Christians trained 
through the Old Testament to know God, do we hear those 
impassioned expressions of personal love, w^hich give us a 
sublime conception of the adoration of which human hearts 
are capable. Let us hear David — " Whom have I in heaven 
but Thee ? and there is none upon earth that I desire in 
comparison of Thee ;" " My soul is athirst for God, yea, 
even for the living God." And that glorious outburst of St. 
Paul : " Let God be true, and every man a liar," which can 
be understood only by those who feel that the desertion of 
all, and the discovery of the falseness of all, would be as 
nothing compared with a single doubt of the faithfulness of 
God. 

n. The other preparation is the patient waiting. 

1. What is waited for? — an Advent of Christ. We must 
extend the ordinary meaning of this expression. There are 
many comings of Christ. 

Christ came in the flesh as a Mediatorial Presence. 

Christ came at the destruction of Jerusalem. 

Christ came, a Spiritual Presence, when the Holy Ghost 
was given. 

Christ comes now in every signal manifestation of redeem- 
ing power. 

Any great reformation of morals and religion is a coming 
of Christ. 

A great revolution, like a thunderstorm, violently sweep- 
ing the evil away, to make way for the good, is a coming of 
Christ. 

Christ will come at the end of the world, when the Spirit 
Df all these comings will be concentrated. 

Thus we may understand in what way Christ is ever com- 
ing and ever near. Why it was that St. James said, " Stab- 
lish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh;" 
and " Behold, the Judge standeth before the door." And we 
shall also understand how it was that the early Church was 
not deceived in expecting Christ in their own day. He did 
come, though not in the way they expected. 



Waiting for the Second Advent, 679 

2, What is meant by " waiting ?" 

Now it is remarkable that throughout the apostle's writ- 
ings, the Christian attitude of soul is represented as an atti- 
tude of expectation — as in this passage, " So that ye come 
behind in no gift ; waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus 
Christ ;" and again, " We are saved by hope : but hope that 
is seen is not hope : for what a man seeth, why doth he yet 
hope for ? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we 
with patience loait for it." Salvation in hope : that was 
their teaching. Not a perfection attained, but a perfection 
that is to be. 

The golden age lies onward. We are longing for, not the 
Church of the past, but the Church of the future. Ours is not 
an antiquated, sentimental yearning for the imaginary perfec- 
tion of ages gone by, not a conservative stagnation content 
with things as they are, but hope — for the individual and for 
the society. By Him we have access by faith, and rejoice in 
hope of the glory that shall be revealed. A better, wiser, 
purer age than that of childhood. An age more enlightened 
and more holy than the world has yet seen. " Behold, the 
tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, 
and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with 
them, and be their God." It is this spirit of expectation 
which is the preparation for the Advent. Every gift of no- 
ble origin is breathed upon by hope's perfect breath. 

3. Let us note that it \^ patient waiting. 

Every one who has ardently longed for any spiritual 
blessing knows the temptation to impatience in expecting it. 
Good men who, like Elijah, have sickened over the degener- 
acy and luxury of their times ; fathers who have watched 
the obduracy and wild career of a child whom they have 
striven in vain to lead to God ; such cry out from the deeps 
of the heart, " Where is the promise of His coming ?" 

Now the true preparation is, not having correct ideas of 
how and when He shall come, but being like Him. " It is 
not for you to know the times or the seasons which the Fa- 
ther hath put in His own power ;" " Every man that hath 
this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He is pure." 

Application. "The Lord direct you" unto this. 

Consider what the Thessalonians must have felt in their 
perplexity. Would that we had a teacher such as St. Paul, 
ever at hand to tell us what is truth — to distinguish be- 
tween fanaticism and genuine enthusiasm — between wild 
false teaching and truth rejected by the many. " Here," 
might they have said, " were we bewildered. How shall 
we hereafter avoid similar bewilderments without an infalli- 



68o The Sinlessness of Christ. 

ble guide ?" Instead of which St. Paul says, " The Lord di- 
rect your hearts into the love of God, and into the patient 
waiting for Christ." 

God has so decreed, that except in childhood, our depend- 
ence must be on our own souls. " The way of truth is slow, 
hard, winding, often turning on itself" Good and evil grow 
up in the field of the world almost inseparably. The scan- 
ning of error is necessary to the comprehension and belief of 
truth. Therefore it must be done solitarily. Nay, such an 
infallible guide could not be given to us without danger. 
Such a one ever near would prove not a guide to us, but a 
hindrance to the use of our own eyes and souls. . Reverence 
for such a guide would soon degenerate into slavishness, pas- 
siveness, and prostration of mind. 

Hence, St. Paul throws us upon God. 



IX. 

THE SmLESSNESS OF CHRIST. 

"Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin ig the 
ti-ansgression of the law. And ye know that he was manifested to take 
away our sins ; and in him is no sin." — 1 John iii. 4, 5. 

The heresy with which the Apostle St. John had to con- 
tend in his day was an error of a kind and character which 
it is hard for us with our practical, matter-of-fact modes of 
thinking, to comprehend. There were men so over-refined 
and fastidious, that they could not endure the thought of 
any thing spiritual being connected with materialism. They 
could not believe in any thing being pure that was also 
fleshly, for flesh and sinfulness were to them synonymous 
terms. They could not believe in the Divine humanity, for 
humanity was to them the very opposite of that which was 
Divine : and accordingly, while admitting the Divinity of 
Jesus, they denied the reality of His materialism. They 
said of His earthly life exactly what the Roman Catholic 
says of the miracle he claims to be performed in the Supper 
of the Lord. The Roman Catholic maintains that it is sim- 
ply an illusion of the senses ; there is the taste of the bread, 
the look of the bread, the smell of the bread, but it is all a 
deception : there is no bread really there, it is only the spir- 
itual body of the Lord. Tliat which the Romanist says now 
of the elements in the Lord's Supper, did these ancient here* 



The Sinlessness of Christ, 68 1 

tics say respecting the body and the life of Jesus. There 
was, they said, the sound of the human voice, there was the 
passing from place to place, there were deeds done, there 
were sufferings undergone, but these were all an illusion 
and a phantasma — a thing that appeared, but did not 
really exist. The everlasting Word of God was making it- 
self known to the minds of men through the senses by an 
illusion ; for to say that the Word of God was made flesh, to 
maintain that He connected Himself with sinful, frail hu- 
manit}^ — this was degradation to the Word — this was de- 
struction to the purity of the Divine Essence. 

You will observe that in all this there was an attempt to 
be eminently spiritual ; and what seems exceedingly marvel- 
lous, is the fact withal that these men led a life of extreme 
licentiousness. Yet it is not marvellous, if we think accu- 
rately, for we find even now that over-refinement is but 
coarseness. And so, just in the same way, these ultra-spirit- 
ualists, though they would not believe that the Divine Es- 
sence could be mingled with human nature without degrada- 
tion, yet they had no intention of elevating human nature by 
their own conduct. They thought they showed great re- 
spect for Jesus in all this : they denied the reality of his suf- 
ferings ; they would not admit the conception that frail, un- 
dignified humanity was veritably His, but nevertheless they 
had no intention of living more spiritually themselves. 

It was therefore that we find in another epistle, St. John 
gives strict commands to his converts not to admit these 
heretics into their houses : and the reason that he gives is, 
that by so doing they would be partakers, not of their evil 
doctrines, but of their evil deeds. They were a licentious 
set of men, and it is necessary to keep this in view if we 
would understand the writings of St. John. It is for this 
reason, therefore, that he says-^" That which was from the 
beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with 
our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have 
handled of the Word of Life, declare we unto you." It is for 
this reason that he, above all the apostles, narrates with scru- 
pulous accuracy all the particulars respecting the Redeemer's 
risen body — that he joined in the repast of the broiled fish 
and the honey-comb : and that he dwells with such minute- 
ness on the fact that there came from the body of the Re- 
deemer blood and water : " Not water only, but water and 
blood ;" and it is for this reason that in speaking of Anti- 
christ he says, " Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus 
Christ is come in the flesh is not of God, and this is that spip 
it of Antichrist whereof ye have heard that it should come." 



682 The Sinks sness of Christ, 

So, then, we learn from this that the most spiritual of all 
the apostles was the one who insisted most earnestly on the 
materialism of the human nature of our Lord. He who 
alone had penetrated into that realm beyond, where the 
King was seen on His throne of light, was the one who felt 
most strongly that in humanity there is nothing degrading. 
In the natural propensities of human nature there is nothing 
to be ashamed of: there is nothing for a man to be ashamed 
of but sin — there is nothing more noble than a perfect hu- 
man nature. 

My brethren, though the error of the ancient times can not 
be repeated in this age in the same form, though this strange 
belief commends itself not to our minds, yet there may be 
such an exclusive dwelling upon the Divinity of Jesus as ab- 
solutely to destroy His real humanity ; there may be such a 
morbid sensitiveness when we speak of Him as taking our 
nature, as will destroy the fact of His sufferings — yes, and 
destroy the reality of His atonement also. There is a way 
of speaking of the sinlessness of Jesus that would absolutely 
make that scene on Calvary a mere pageant in which He was 
actin2^ a part in a drama, during which He was not really 
suffering, and did not really crush the propensities of His hu« 
man nature. It was for this reason we lately dwelt on the 
Redeemer's sufferings ; now let us pass onward to the fact of 
the sinlessness of His nature. 

The subject divides itself — first, into the sinlessness of His 
nature ; and secondly, the power which He possessed from 
that sinlessness to take away the sins of the world. 

With respect to the first branch, we have given us a defi- 
nition of what sin is — " Sin is the transgression of the law." 
It is to be observed there is a difference between sin and 
transgression. Every sin is a transgression of the law, but 
every transgression of the law is not necessarily a sin. Who- 
soever committeth sin transgresseth also the law. Now 
mark the difference. It is possible for a man to transgress 
the law of God, not knowingly, and then in inspired language 
we are told that " sin is not imputed unto him." Yet for all 
that, the penalty will follow whenever a man transgresses, 
but the chastisement which belongs to sin, to known willful 
transgression, will not follow. 

Let us take a case in the Old Testament, which it may be 
as well to explain, because sometimes there is a diflEiculty 
felt in it. We read of the patriarchs and saints in the Old 
Testament as living in polygamy. There was no distinct 
law forbidding it, but there was a law written in the "fleshly 
tables of the heart," against which it is impossible to trans 



The Siitlessness of Christ, 6 33 

gress without incurring a penalty. Accordingly, tho'Agh we 
never find that the patriarchs are blamed for the moral fault, 
though you never find them spoken of as having broken the 
written law of God, yet you see they reaped the penalty that 
ever must be reaped — in the case of one, degradation : in the 
case of the other, slavery. Jacob's many wives brought dis- 
sension and misery into his household, though he did it inno- 
cently and ignorantly, and he reaped the penalty — quarrels 
and wretchedness. In all this there is penalty, but there is 
not sin in all this, and therefore there was not excited that 
agony which comes from the pangs of conscience after will- 
ful sin. 

Every misery that falls on man has been the consequence 
of transgression, his own trespass or those of others. It may 
have been his parents, his grandparents, or his far-back an- 
cestors, who have given him the disadvantages under which 
he labors. How shall we explain the fact that misery falls 
alike on the good and on the evil? Only by remembering 
whether it comes as the penalty of transgression ignorantly 
done : then it is but the gentle discipline of a Father's love, 
educating His child, it may be warning the child and giving 
him the knowledge of that law of which he was hitherto ig- 
norant. This wretchedness of the patriarchs, what was it 
but the corrective dispensation by which the world learnt 
that polygamy is against the law of God ? So the child who 
cuts his hand with the sharp blade of the knife has learnt a 
lesson concerning his need of caution for the future, and if 
well and bravely borne, he is the better for it ; but if there 
has been added to that transgression the sin of disobedience 
to his parent's command, then there is something inflicted 
beyond the penalty ; there is all that anguish of conscience 
and remorse which comes as the consequence of sin. Now 
we have seen what transgression is, let us try and understand 
what sin is. 

My Christian brethren, it is possible for us to mistake this 
subject by taking figurative expressions too literally. We 
speak of sin as if it were a thing, as if we were endowed with 
it, like memory, or judgment, or imagination, as a faculty 
which must be exercised. Now let us learn the truth of 
what sin is — it " is the transgression of the law." There 
must be some voluntary act, transgressing some known law, 
or there is no sin. There were those in the days of St. John 
who held that sin was merely the infirmity of the flesh ; that 
if a man committed sin, and he was to know that it was the 
working merely of his lower nature, not of his own mind — 
his faith would save him. 



6S4 The Sinlessness of Christ, 

Another error was that of the Pharisees in the days of Je^ 
BUS ; and their error was precisely opposite. " Yes," said the 
Pharisees, " sin is the transgression of the law. Holiness is 
conformity to the law, and the lives of the Pharisees being 
conformable to the ceremonial law, we stand before the world 
as, touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless." 
The Redeemer comes, and He gives another exposition of 
sin. " Sin is the transgression of the law," but there is a law 
written for the heart, as well as for the outward man. There 
is a work to be done within as well as without. A murder 
may be committed by indulging revenge and malice, though 
the hand has never been lifted to strike. It is not the out- 
ward act that constitutes alone the morality of Christ, it is 
the feeling of the heart, the acts of the inner man. 

But then there is another error from which we have to 
guard ourselves. It is a sophistry in which some men in- 
dulge themselves. They say, " Well, if the thought is as bad 
as the act, why should we not therefore do the act ? I am 
as guilty as if I had committed transgression ; why should I 
debar myself from the enjoyment ?" It is, I say, but sophis- 
try, for no man that has any conscience can really so deceive 
himself The Redeemer's doctrine was that many a man 
whose outward life was pure and spotless » would have done 
the transgression if he had had the opportunity. It is one 
thing to say that he would have done it if he could, but it is 
quite another thing to say that a man who has indulged the 
thought, and has drawn back, is as guilty as if he had actual- 
ly carried out the evil act. The difference lies in this — the 
one would have done it if he could, and the other could and 
would not. 

We read in the Bible of two men who exemplify this. They 
both resolved to commit murder, and the opportunity was 
given to each. Saul threw his javelin with right good will 
at David's person ; he did all that resolution could do, it was 
but what is called accident that left the javelin quivering in 
the wall. Opportunity was given also to David. He had 
resolved to slay Saul, but when the tempting opportunity 
came, when he was bending over Saul, full of the thought of 
destroying his enemy, at the very last moment he paused — 
his conscience smote him — he refused to strike. Which of 
these was the murderer ? Saul was the murderer : he had 
slain in his heart. It was but an accident that prevented it. 
In the other case there had been the indulgence of a wrong 
thought, but it was subdued. He might say, he might as 
well have slain his foe, but would you say that he was in the 
same position as a murderer ? No, Christian brethren, let 



The Shilessness of Christ. 685 

there be no sophistry of this kind among us. It is but a sub 
tie whisper from our great adversary that would beguile us. 
Generally there is first a rising of an inclination which is 
often no sin. This passes on to a guilty resolve — one step 
more, and the man has committed the sin. 

Now let us turn to the character of our blessed Redeemer, 
and we shall find him doubly free from all this — as free in de- 
sire as free in act The proof of his perfect purity is to be 
found in the testimony of His enemies, of His friends, and of 
those indifferent to Him. We have first the evidence of His 
enemies. For three long years the Pharisees were watching 
their victim. There was the Pharisee mingling in every 
crowd, hiding behind every tree. They examined His disci- 
ples ; they cross-questioned all around Him ; they looked into 
His ministerial life, into His domestic privacy, into His hours 
of retirement. They came forward with the sole accusation 
that they could muster — that He had shown disrespect to the 
Roman governor. The Roman judge, who at least should 
know, had pronounced the accusation null and void. There 
was another spy. It was Judas. If there had been one act 
of sin, one failing in all the Redeemer's career that betrayed 
ambition, that betrayed any desire to aggrandize Himself — 
in his hour of terrible remorse Judas would have remembered 
it for his own comfort ; but the bitterness of his feelings — ■ 
that which made life insufferable — was that he had " betray- 
ed innocent blood." 

Pass we on to those who were indifferent. And first we 
have the opinion of Pilate himself. Contemporary historians 
tell us that Pilate was an austere and cruel man, a man of 
firm resolve, and one who shrank not from the destruction of 
human life ; but we see here that for once the cruel man be- 
came merciful : for once the man of resolve became timid. It 
was not merely that he thought Jesus was innocent ; the hard 
Roman mind would have cared little for the sacrifice of an 
obscure Jew. The soul of Pilate was pervaded with the feel- 
ing that spotless innocence stood before him, and this feel- 
ing extended even to Pilate's wife : for we find that she sent 
to him and said, " Have thou nothing to do with that just 
man." It was not because he was going to pass an unjust 
sentence — he had often done so before — but she felt that 
here was an innocent one who must not be condemned. 

Now let us consider the testimony of His friends. They 
tell us that during their intercourse of three years His was 
a life unsullied by a single spot : and I pray you to remem- 
her that tells us something of the holiness of the thirty pre 
vious years ; for no man springs from sin into perfect Vight 



686 The Sinlessness of Christ. 

eousness at once. If there has been any early wrong-doing 
— though a man may be changed — yet there is something 
left that tells of his early character — a want of refinement, 
of delicacy, of purity ; a tarnish has passed upon the bright- 
ness, and can not be rubbed off. If we turn to the testimo- 
ny of John the Baptist, His contemporary, about the same 
stge, one who knew Him not at first as the Messiah : yet 
when the Son of Man comes to him simply as a man, and 
asks him to baptize Him, John turns away in astonishment, 
shocked at the idea. " I have need to be baptized of thee : 
and comest thou to me ?" In other words, the purest and 
the most austere man that could be found on earth was com- 
pelled to acknowledge that in Him who came for baptism 
there was neither stain nor spot that the water of Jordan 
was needed to wash away. So we see there was no actual 
transgression in our blessed Lord. 

Now let us see what the inward life was ; for it is very 
possible that there may be no outward transgression, and 
yet that the heart may not be pure. It is possible that out- 
wardly all may seem right, through absence of temptation, 
and yet there may be the want of inward perfection. Of 
the perfection of Jesus we can have but one testimony ; it 
can not be that of the apostles, for the lesser can not judge 
the greater, and therefore we turn to Himself He said, 
" Which of you can charge me with sin ?" " I and my Fa- 
ther are one." Now we must remember that just in pro- 
portion as a man becomes more holy does he feel and ac- 
knowledge the evil that is in him. Thus it was with the 
Apostle Paul ; he declared, " I am the chief of sinners." 
But here is One who attained the highest point of human 
excellence, who was acknowledged even by His enemies to 
be blameless, who declares Himself to be sinless. 

If, then, the Son of Man were not the promised Redeemer, 
He, the humblest of mankind, might justly be accused of 
pride ; the purest of mankind would be deemed to be un- 
conscious of the evil that was in Him. He who looked so 
deeply into the hearts of others is ignorant of His own ; the 
truest of mankind is guilty of the worst of falsehoods ; the 
noblest of mankind guilty of the sin of sins — the belief that 
He had no sin. Let but the infidel grant us that human na- 
ture has never attained to what it attained in the character 
of Jesus, then we carry him still farther, that even He whom 
he acknowledges to be the purest of men declared Himself 
to be spotless, which, if it were false, would at once do away 
with all the purity which he grants was His. It was not 
only the outward acts, but the inner life of Jesus which was 



The Sinlessness of Christ, 687 

so pure. His mind regulates every other mind ; it moves in 
perfect harmony with the mind of God. In all the just men 
that ever lived you w^ill find some peculiarity carried into 
excess. We note this in the zeal of St. John, in the courage 
of St. Peter, in the truth-seeking of St. Thomas. It was not 
so with Jesus : no one department of His human nature ever 
superseded another : all was harmony there. The one sound 
which haS'Come down from God in perfect melody, is His life, 
the entire unbroken music of humanity. 

We pass on to our second subject — the power there is in 
the manifested sinlessness of Jesus to take away the sins of 
the world. There are two aspects in which we are to con- 
sider this : first in reference to man, and secondly in reference 
to God. Our subject to-day will confine itself to the first ; 
on the other, we simply say this : there is, in the eternal con- 
stitution of the heavenly government, that which makes the 
life and death of Jesus the atonement for the world's sins. 
Human nature, which fell in Adam, rose again in Christ ; in 
Him it became a different thing altogether in God's sight — 
redeemed now, hereafter to be perfected. 

But we leave this for the present, and consider how the 
world was purified by the change of its own nature. " If I 
be lifted up I will draw all men unto me." There are three 
w^ays by which this may be done — by faith, by hope, and by 
love. It is done by faith, for the most degrading thing in 
the heart of man is the disbelief in the goodness of human 
nature. We live in evil, and surrounded by evil, until we 
have almost ceased to believe in greatness of mind or char- 
acter. The more a man increases in knowledge of the world, 
the more does he suspect human nature ; a knowing man, 
according to worldly phraseology, is one that will trust no 
one. He knows that he himself has his price, and he believes 
that he can buy any one else : and this may be called the 
second fall of man — that moment when all our boyish belief 
in goodness passes away; when such degradation and an- 
guish of soul comes on, that we cease to believe in woman's 
purity or in man's integrity ; when a man has fallen so low 
there is nothing in this world that can raise him, except 
faith in the perfect innocence of Jesus. Then it is that there 
bursts upon the world — that of which the world never 
dreamed — entire and perfect purity, spotless integrity — no 
mere dreaming of philosophers and sages — though the dream 
were a blessed thing to have ; the tangible living Being be^ 
fore us, whom w^e can see, and touch, and hear, so that a man 
is able to come to his brother with trust in elevated humanity 
and to say, " This is He of whom the prophets did write," 



688 The Sinks sness of Christ 

But secondly, trust in Divine humanity elevates the sou!i 
by hope. You must have observed the hopefulness of the 
character of Jesus — his hopefulness for human nature. If 
ever there were one who might have despaired, it was He. 
Full of love Himself, He was met with every sort of unkind- 
ness, every kind of derision. There was treachery in one of 
His disciples, dissension amongst them all. He was engaged 
in the hardest work that man ever tried. He was met by 
the hatred of the whole world, by torture and the cross ; and 
yet never did the hope of human nature forsake the Redeem- 
er's soul. He vrould not break the bruised reed nor quench 
the smoking flax. There was a spark mingling even in the 
lowest humanity, which He would fain have fanned into a 
blaze. The lowest publican Jesus could call to Him and 
touch his heart ; the lowest profligate that was ever trodden 
under foot by the world was one for whom He could hope 
still. If He met with penitents. He would welcome them ; 
if they were not penitents, but yet felt the pangs o.f detected 
guilt, still with hopefulness He pointed to forgiven human- 
ity : this was His word, even to the woman brought to Him 
by her accusers, " Go, and sin no more ;" in His last moments 
on the cross, to one who was dying by His side. He prom- 
ised a place in Paradise : and the last words that broke from 
the Redeemer's lips — what were they but hope for our hu- 
manity, while the curses were ringing in His ears ? — " Fa- 
ther, forgive them, for they know not what they do." 

Now it is this hopefulness that raises hope in us. Chris- 
tian brethren, we dare to hope for that nature which Jesus 
loved, we dare to forgive that nature which Jesus conde- 
scended to wear. This frail, evil, weak humanity of ours, 
these hearts that yield to almost every gust of temptation, 
the Son of Man hoped for them. 

And thirdly, it is done also by love; hate narrows the 
heart, love expands the heart. To hate is to be miserable ; 
to love is to be happy. To love is to have almost the power 
of throwing aside sin. See the power of love in the hearts 
of those around Him. He comes to a desponding man, 
nourishing dark thoughts of the world ; He speaks encourag- 
ingly, and the language of that man is, " Lord, I will follow 
thee whithersoever thou goest." He goes to a man who had 
loved money all his life. He treats him as a man, and the 
man's heart is conquered : " Behold, Lord, the half of my 
goods I give to the poor." He comes to the coward, who 
had denied Him, and asks him simply, "Lovest thou Me?" 
and the coward becomes a martyr, and dares to ash to be 
crucified. He comes to a sinful woman, who had spent large 



The Sinlessness of Christ, 689 

gums on the adornment of her person, and the ointment 
which was intended for herself was poured in love upon Hia 
feet, mingling with her tears. " She loved much," and much 
was forgiven. 

And it was not during the Redeemer's life alone that the 
power of His love extended. It was manifested also after 
His death. There was the healing act done on the man who 
asked for alms. For this the apostles were carried before 
the Sadducees, and the man on whom this miracle was done 
stood by them, full of strength and courage. The day be- 
fore he had been a miserable, cringing suppliant, beseeching 
pity from the passers-by. But all the wailing tone is gone; 
the attitude of the suppliant has passed away, and the reno- 
vated cri23ple fronts the supreme judicature of Israel with a 
lion heart. Ask you what has inspired and dignified that 
man, and raised him higher in the scale of humanity ? It 
was the power of love. It is not so much the manifestation 
of this doctrine or that doctrine, that can separate the soul 
from sin. It is not the law. It is not by pressing on the, 
lower nature to restrain it, that this can be done, but it is by 
elevating it. He speaks not to the degraded of the sinful- 
ness of sin, but He dwells upon the love of the Father, upon 
His tender mercies ; and if a man would separate himself 
from the bondage of guilt, there is no other way than this. 
My Christian brethren, forget that miserable past life of 
yours, and look up to the streams of mercy ever flowing 
from the right hand of God. 

My brethren, it is on this principle that we desire to 
preach to the heathen. We would preach neither high 
Church nor low Church doctrine. We desire to give Jesus 
Christ to the world ; and in pleading for this Society* I will 
not endeavor to excite your sympathies by drawing a pic- 
ture of the heathen world suspended over unutterable mis- 
ery, and dropping minute by minute into everlasting wretch- 
edness. It is easy to do this ; and then to go away calmly 
and quietly to our comfortable meals and our handsome 
habitations, satisfied with having demonstrated so tremen- 
dous a fact. But this we say, if we would separate the world 
from sin, and from the penalty of sin, and the inward misery 
of the heart attendant on sin in this world and the world to 
come, it is written in Scripture, "There is none other name 
under heaven given among men, whereby we must ba 
caved," than the name of Jesus. 

* Church Missionary Society. 



Oqo Christ's Way of Dealing with Sin, 



X. 

CHRIST'S WAY OF DEALING WITH SIK. 

*'And immediately, when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they so rea. 
soned within themselves, he said unto them. Why reason ye these things in 
your hearts ? Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy. Thy sins be 
forgiven thee ; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk ? But that 
ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins (he 
saith to the sick of the palsy), I say unto thee. Arise, and take up thy bed, 
and go thy way into thine house." — Mark ii. 8-11. 

This anecdote is doubtless a familiar one to us all. 

The Son of God was teaching in a house full of listeners, 
round which crowds were pressing. The friends of a poor 
palsied man desired His aid. It was scarcely possible for 
one person to edge his way through the press, where all 
longed to hear, and none of the crowd were likely to give 
place ; but, for the cumbrous apparatus of a pallet borne by 
four, it was impossible. Therefore they ascended by the 
outside staircase, which, in Oriental countries leads to the 
flat roof, which they broke up, and let their friend down in 
the midst, before Jesus. No doubt this must have struck 
every one. But the impression produced on the spectators 
would probably have been very different from that produced 
on Christ. They that saw the bed descending from the roof 
over the heads of all, and who had before seen the fruitless 
efforts that had been made to get in, and now remembered 
that he who had been farthest from Christ was unexpect- 
edly in a few minutes nearest to Him, could not have with- 
held that applause which follows a successful piece of dex- 
terity. They would have admired the perseverance, or the 
ingenuity, or the inventiveness. 

On none of these qualities did Christ fix as an explanation 
of the fact. He went deeper. He traced it to the deepest 
source of power that exists in the mind of man. " When 
Jesus saw their /a^YA." For as love is deepest in the being 
of God, so faith is the mightiest principle in the soul of man. 
Let us distinguish their several essences. Love is the es- 
sence of the Deity — that which makes it Deity. Faith is 
the essence of humanity, which constitutes it what it is. 
And, as here, it is the warring principle of this world which 
wins in life's battle. No wonder that it is written in Scrip 



Chris fs Way of Dealing with Sin. 691 

ture — " This is the victory that overcometh the world, even 
our faith." No wonder it is said, " All things are possible 
to him that believeth." It is that w^hich wrestles with diffi- 
culty, removes mountains, tramples upon impossibilities. It 
is this spirit which in the common aftairs of life, known as a 
" sanguine temperament," never says " impossible " and nev- 
er believes in failure, leads the men of the w^orld to their 
most signal successes, makmg them believe a thing possible 
because they hope it ; and giving substantial reality to that 
which before was a shadow and a dream. 

It w^as this " substance of things hoped for " that gave 
America to Columbus, when billows, miles deep, rose be- 
tween him and the land, and the men he commanded well- 
nigh rose in rebellion against the obstinacy which believed 
in " things not yet seen." It was this that crowned the 
Mohammedan arms for seven centuries with victory: so 
long as they believed themselves the champions of the One 
God with a mission from Him, they were invincible. And 
it is this which so often obtains for some new system of 
medicine the honor of a cure, when the real cause of cure is 
only the patient's trust in the remedies. 

So it is in religion. For faith is not something heard of 
in theology alone, created by Christianity, but it is one of 
the commonest principles of life. He that believes a bless- 
ing is to be got, that " God is a rewarder of them that dili- 
gently seek Him," will venture much, and will likewise win 
much. For, as with this palsied man, faith is inventive, ever 
fertile in expedients — like our own English character, never 
knowing when it has been foiled ; and then nearest victory 
at the very moment when the last chance has seemed to fail 
We divide our subject into — * 

I. The malady presented to Christ. 
II. His treatment of it. . 

I. The malady, apparently, was nothing more than palsy. 
But not as such did Jesus treat it. The by-standers might 
have been surprised at the first accost of Jesus to the para- 
lytic man. It was not, " Take up thy bed and walk ;" but 
"Thy sins be forgiven thee." As with their faith, so it was 
here. He went deeper than perseverance or ingenuity. He 
goes deeper than the outward evil ; down to the evil, the 
root of all evil, properly the only evil — sin. He read in that 
sufferer's heart a deeper wish than appeared in the outward 
act, the consequences of a burden worse than palsy, the 
longing for a rest more profound than release from pain — 
the desire to be healed of guilt. It was m reply to this tacU 



692 Christ's Way of Dealing with Sin, 

application that the words "Thy sins be forgiven thee" 
were spoken. 

Now, sin has a twofold set of consequences. 1. The natu- 
ral consequences. 2, The moral consequences. 

1. By the natural, we mean those results which come in- 
evitably in the train of wrong-doing, by what we call the 
laws of nature visiting themselves on the outward condition 
of a sinner, by which sin and suffering are linked together. 
As for example, when an intemperate man ruins his health, 
or an extravagant man leaves himself broken in fortune ; or 
when tyrannical laws bring an uprising of a people against 
a tyrant : these are respectively the natural penalties of 
wrong-doing. 

Here, apparently, palsy had been the natural result of sin ; 
for otherwise the address of Christ was out of place and 
meaningless. And what we are concerned to remark is, 
that these natural consequences of sin are often invisible as 
well as inevitable. Probably not one of the four friends 
who bore him suspected such a connection. Possibly not 
even his physician. But there were two at least to whom 
the connection was certain — the conscience of the palsied 
man himself, whose awakened memory traced back the trem- 
bling of those limbs to the acts of a youth long past ; and to 
the all-seeing eye of Him to whom past, present, and future 
are but one. 

And such experience, brethren, is true, doubtless, much 
oftener than we imagine. The irritable temperament, the 
lost memory which men bewail, the over-sensitive brain, as 
if causeless — who can tell how they stand connected with 
sins done long ago? For nothing here stands alone and 
causeless. Every man, with his strength and his weaknesses, 
stunted in body or dwarfed in heart, palsied in nerve or 
deadened in sensibility, is the exact result and aggregate of 
all the past — all that has been done by himself, and all that 
has been done by his ancestors, remote or near. The Saviour 
saw in this palsied man the miserable wreck of an ill-spent 
life. 

2. Now quite distinct from these are the moral conse- 
quences of guilt : by which I mean those which tell upon 
iihe character and inward being of the man who sins. In 
one sense, no doubt, H is a natural result, inasmuch as it is 
Dy a law, regular and unalterable, a man becomes by sin 
deteriorated in character, or miserable. Now these are two- 
fold, negative and positive — the loss of some blessing, or 
the accruing of some evil to the heart. Loss — as when by 
sinning we lose the capacity for all higher enjoyments; for 



Christ's Way of Dealing with Sin, 693 

none can sin without blunting his sensibilities. He has lost 
the zest of a pure life, the freshness and the flood of happi? 
ness which come to every soul when it is delicate, and pure, 
and natural. This is no light loss. If any one here con- 
gratulates himself that sin has brought to him no positive 
misery, my brother, I pray you to remember that God's 
worst curse was pronounced upon the serpent tempter. Ap- 
parently it was far less than that pronounced on the woman, 
but really it was far more terrible. Not pain, not shame — 
no, these are remedial, and may bring penitence at last — but 
to sink the angel in the animal, the spirit in the flesh ; to be 
a reptile, and to eat the dust of degradation as if it were 
natural food. Eternity has no damnation deeper than 
that. 

Then, again, a positive result — the dark and dreadful lone- 
liness that comes from doing^ wrons^ — a conscious unrest 
which plunges into business, or pleasure, or society, not for 
the love of these things, but to hide itself from itself as 
Adam did in the trees of the garden, because it dare not 
hear the voice of God, nor believe in His Presence. Do we 
not know something of a self-reproach and self-contempt, 
which, alternating at times with pride, almost tear the soul 
asunder ? And such was the state of this man. His pains 
were but the counterpart and reflection of a deeper sorrow. 
Pain had laid him on a bed, and said to him, " Lie there face 
to face with God — and think!" We pass on now to con- 
sider — 

n. Christ's treatment of that malady. 

By the declaration of God's forgiveness. Brethren, if the 
Gospel of our Master mean any thing it means this — the 
blotting out of sin : " To declare His righteousness in the 
remission of sins that are past." It is the declaration of the 
highest name of God — love. Let us understand what for- 
giveness is. The forgiveness of God acts upon the moral 
consequences of sin directly and immediately ; on the nat- 
ural, mediately and indirectly. 

Upon the moral consequences directly. Remorse passes 
into penitence and love. There is no more loneliness, for 
God has taken up His abode there. No more self-contempt, 
for he whom God has forgiven learns to forgive himself. 
There is no more unrest, for " being justified by faith, we 
have peace with God." Then the fountains of the great 
deep are broken up, and unwonted happy tears can come — 
as with the woman in the Gospels. I pray you to observe 
that this comes directly, with no interval — " Being justified 



694 Christ V Way of Dealing with Sin. 

by faith." For God's love is not an ofter but a gift ; not 
clogged with conditions, but free as' the air we breathe. 

Upon the natural consequences, not directly, but indirectly 
and mediately. The forgiveness of Christ did not remove 
the palsy ; that was the result of a separate, distinct act of 
Christ. It is quite conceivable that it might never have 
been removed at all — that he might have been forgiven, and 
the palsy suffered to remain. God might have dealt with 
him as He did in David's case : on his repentance there came 
to him the declaration of God's pardon, his person was ac- 
cepted, the moral consequences were removed, but the nat- 
ural consequences remained. " The Lord hath put away thy 
sin, nevertheless the child which is born to thee shall die." 

Consider, too, that without a miracle they must have re- 
mained in this man's case. It is so in everyday life. If the 
intemperate man repents he will receive forgiveness, but will 
that penitence give him back the steady hand of youth? 
Or if the suicide between the moment of draining the poison- 
ed cup and that of death repent of his deed, will that arrest 
the operation of the poison ? A strong constitution or the 
physician may possibly save life ; but penitence has nothing 
to do with it. Say that the natural penal consequence of 
crime is the scaffold : Did the pardon given to the dying 
thief unnail his hands? Did Christ's forgiveness interfere 
with the natural consequences of his guilt ? 

And thus, we are brought to a very solemn and awful con- 
sideration, awful because of its truth and simiDlicity. The 
consequences of past deeds remain. They have become part 
of the chain of the universe — effects which now are causes, 
and will work and interweave themselves with the history 
of the world forever. You can not undo your acts. If you 
have depraved another's will, and injured another's soul, it 
may be in the grace of God that hereafter you will be per- 
sonally accepted and the consequences of your guilt inward- 
ly done away, but your penitence can not undo the evil you 
have done, and God's worst punishment may be that you 
may have to gaze half frantic on the ruin you have caused, on 
the evil you have done, which you might have left undone, 
but which being done is now beyond your power forever. 
This is the eternity of human acts. The forgiveness of God 
— the blood of Christ itself — does not undo the past. 

And yet even here the grace of God's forgiveness is not in 
vain. It can not undo the natural consequences of sin, but it 
may by His mercy transform them into blessings. For ex- 
ample, suppose this man's palsy to have been left still with 
him, himself accepted, his soul at peace. Well, he is thence 



Christ's Way of Dealing with Sin, 695 

fortli a crippled man. But crippling, pain — are these neces^ 
sarily evils? Do we not say continually that sorrow and 
pain are God's loving discipline given to His legitimate chil- 
dren, to be exempt from which were no blessing, proving 
them to be " bastards and not sons ?" And why should not 
that palsy be such to him, though it was the result of his 
own fault? Once,, when it seemed in the light of the guilty 
conscience only the foretaste of coming doom — the outward a 
type of the inward, every pang sending him farther from 
God, it was a curse. Now, when penitence and love had 
come, and that palsy was received with patience, meekness, 
why may it not be a blessing ? What makes the outward 
events of life blessings or the reverse ? Is it not all from 
ourselves ? Did not dissolution become quite another thing 
by the Fall — changed into death; assuming thereby an en- 
tirely altered character : no longer felt as a natural blessed 
herald, becoming the messenger of God, summoning to high- 
er life, but now obtaining that strange name — the "king of 
terrors ?" And in Christ, death becomes our minister again : 
" Ours," as St. Paul says, " with all other things." The cross 
of Christ has restored to death something more blessed than 
its original peacefulness. A sleep now : not death at all. 
And will not a changed heart change all things around us, and 
make the worst consequence of our own misdoing minister 
to our eternal welfare ? So that God's forgiveness, assured 
to us in the cross of Christ, is a complete remedy for sin, act- 
ing on its natural consequences by transformation indirectly ; 
on its moral results directly, by removing them. 

Lastly, let us learn from this the true aim and meaning of 
miracles. Let us attend to the account our Master gives us 
of the reason why He performed this miracle. Read verses 
9, 10. To say, " Thy sins be forgiven thee," was easy, for no 
visible result could test the saying. To say, " Take up thy 
bed and walk," was not apparently so easy, for failure would 
cover with confusion. He said the last, leaving the infer- 
ence — If I can do the most difficult, then of course, I can do 
the easier. Here we have the true character of a miracle : it 
;s the outward manifestation of the power of God, in order 
that we may believe in the power of God in things that are 
invisible. 

Now contrast this with the popular view. Miracles arc 
commonly reckoned as proofs of Christ's mission, accrediting 
His other truths, and making them, which would be other- 
wise incredible, evidently from God. I hesitate not to say- 
that nowhere in the New Testament are they spoken of in 
this way. When the Pharisees asked for evidences and 



696 Christ's Way of Dealing with Sin, 

signs, His reph^ was, " There shall no sign be given you." 
So said St. Paul in his Epistle to the Corinthians — not signs, 
but " Christ crucified." He had no conception of our modern 
notion of miracles — things chiefly valuable because they can 
be collected into a portable volume of evidences to prove 
that God is love : that we should love one another ; that He 
is the Father of all men. These need no proofs, they are 
like the sun shining by his own light. 

Christ's glorious miracles were not to prove these, but 
that through the seen the unseen might be known ; to show, 
as it were by specimens, the living Power which works in 
ordinary as well as extraordinary cases. For instance here, 
to show that the One who is seen to say with power, "Take 
up thy bed and walk," arresting the natural consequences of 
sin, is actually, though unseen, arresting its moral conse- 
quences. Or again, that He who bade the waves " Be still " 
in Galilee, is holding now, at this moment, the winds in the 
hollow of His hand. That He who healed the sick and raised 
the dead, holds now and ever in His hand the issues of life 
and death. For the marvellous is to show the source of the 
common. Miracles were no concession to that infidel spirit 
which taints our modern Christianity, and which can not be- 
lieve in God's presence, except it can see Him in the super- 
natural. Rather, they were to make us feel that all is mar- 
vellous, all wonderful, all pervaded with a Divine presence, 
and that the simplest occurrences of life are miracles. 

In conclusion. Let me address those who, like this suffer- 
er, are in any degree conscious either of the natural or moral 
results of sin, working in them. It is apparently a proud and 
\ vain thing for a minister of Christ, himself tainted with 
sin, feeling himself, perhaps more than any one else can feel, 
the misery of a palsied heart, for such a one to give advice 
to his brother-men; but it must be done, for he is but the 
mouthpiece of truths greater than himself, truths which are 
facts, whether he can feel them all or not. 

Therefore, if there be one among us who in the central 
depths of his soul is conscious of a Voice pronouncing the 
past accursed, the present awful, and the future terrible — I 
say to him. Lose no time in disputing, as these Scribes did, 
some Church question, "whether the Son of Man hath power 
on earth to forgive sins ;" nor whether ecclesiastical etiquette 
permits you to approach God in this way or in that way — a 
question as impertinent as it would have been for the palsied 
man to debate whether social propriety permitted him to ap- 
proach the Saviour as he did, instead of through the door. 

My Christian brethren, if the crowd of difficulties which 



Regeneration. 697 

stand between your soul and God succeed in keeping you 
away, all is lost. Right into the Presence you must force 
your way, with no concealment, baring the soul with all its 
ailments before Him, asking, not the arrest of the conse- 
quences of sin, but the " cleansing of the conscience from 
dead works to serve the living God ;" so that if you must 
suffer you shall suffer as a forgiven man. 

This is the time ! Wait not for another opportunity nor 
for different means. For the saying of our Lord is ever ful- 
filled, " The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the 
violent take it by force." 



XI. 
REGENERATION. 



"Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee. Except a man be bora 
of water and of the Spirit, he can not enter into the kingdom of God. That 
which is bom of the flesh is flesh ; and that which is bom of the Spirit is 
spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be bom again. " — John 
iii. 5-7. 

The Church of England has apparently selected this pas- 
sage for the Gospel of Trinity Sunday, because the influences 
of the entire Godhead are named in different verses — the re- 
generating influence of the Spirit, the limitations of the Son 
of Man, and the illimitable nature of the Father. 

It is a threefold way in which God has revealed Himself 
to man — as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. First, as a Father 
in opposition to that doctrine which taught that the whole 
universe is God, and every part of the universe is a portion 
of God. He is the Father who hath made this universe — 
God distinct from us : outside of us : the Creator distin- 
guished from the creation. 

Secondly, God has revealed Himself as a Son, as manifest- 
ed in humanity, chiefly in Christ. Throughout the ages past- 
there has been a mediatorial humanity. Man is in a w^ay 
the reflection of God's nature— the father to the child. The 
prophets, the lawgivers, and especially Moses, are called me- 
diators, through whom God's name was known. The media- 
torial system culminated in Christ, attained the acme of per- 
fection in One — the man Christ Jesus — the express image of 
His Father. The Son is the human side of the mind of God. 

Thirdly, God has revealed himself as the Holy Spirit: not 
as a Father external to us, uor as reflected in humanity still 



698 Regeneration. 

outside us, but as God within us mingling with our being. 
The body of man is His temple. " In Him we live and 
move, and have our being." This is the dispensation of the 
Spirit : He has told us that every holy aspiration, every 
thought and act, that has been on the side of right against 
wrong, is a part of His holy essence, of His Spirit in us. 

This is the threefold manifestation made of Himself to us 
by God. But this is not all, for this alone would not be the 
doctrine of the Trinity. It is quite conceivable that there 
might be one living force manifested in three different ways, 
without its being a trinity. Let us try and understand this 
by an illustration. 

Conceive a circular thin plate of metal : above it you 
would see it such ; at some yards' distance, as an oval, side- 
ways, edgeways, a line. This might be the account of God's 
different aspects : in one relationship to us seen as the Fa- 
ther, in another as the Son, in another as the Spirit ; but this 
is not the doctrine of the Trinity, it is a heresy, known in 
old times by the name of Sabellianism or modal Trinity, de- 
pending on our position in reference to Him. 

Further. This is not merely the same part of His nature, 
seen in different aspects, but diverse parts of His complex 
being — persons: three causes of this manifestation. Just 
as our reason, our memory, our imagination, are not the 
same, but really ourselves. 

Let us take another illustration. A single white ray of 
light, falling on a certain object, appears red ; on another, 
blue ; on another, yellow. That is, the red alone in one case 
is thrown out, the blue or yellow in another. So the differ- 
ent parts of the one ray by turns become visible ; each is a 
complete ray, yet the original white ray is but one. 

So we believe that in that Unity of Essence there are 
three living Powers which we call Persons, distinct from 
each other. It is in virtue of His own incommunicable Es- 
sence that God is the Father. It is the human side of His 
nature by which He is revealed as the Son, so that it was 
not, so to speak, a matter of choice whether the Son or the 
Father should redeem the world. We believe that from all 
eternity there was that in the mind of God which I have 
called its human side, which made it possible for Him to be 
imaged in humanity ; and that again named the Spirit, by 
which He could mix and mingle Himself with us. 

This is the doctrine of the Trinity, explained now, not to 
point the damnatory clause of the Athanasian creed, but 
only in order to seize joyfully the annual opportunity of pro- 
fessing a firm belief in the dogmatic truth of the Trinity. 



Regeneration, 699 

We now pass on to notice more particularly the revela* 
tion to us of one mode in which that blessed Trinity works. 
This will divide itself into two subjects. First, we shall en- 
deavor to understand what is meant by the kingdom of 
God ; and secondly, we shall consider the entrance into that 
kingdom by regeneration. 

Our blessed Lord says, " Except a man be born again, he 
can not enter into the kingdom of God." Now that expres- 
sion — the kingdom of God — is a Jewish one. Nicodemus 
was a Jew ; and we must therefore endeavor to comprehend 
how he would understand it. 

By the kingdom of God, a Jew understood human society 
perfected — that domain on earth where God was visible and 
God ruled. The whole JcAvish dispensation had trained Nic- 
odemus to realize this. The Jewish kingdom was a theocra- 
cy, distinguished from an aristocracy and a democracy. There 
were two main things observable in this. First, it was a 
kingdom in which God's power was manifestly visible by 
miracles, marvels, the cloud and fire pillars, and by appear- 
ances direct from the King of kings. The second matter of 
importance in this conception of the Divine kingdom was 
that it was a society in which a person ruled. God was the 
ruler of this society ; her laws all dated from God's will, and 
were right because the will of the Ruler was right. " Thus 
saith the Lord," was the preface to personal messages from 
their King. 

Bear hi mind, then, that this was Nicodemus's conception 
of the kingdom, and we shall understand the conversation. 
He had seen in the works of Christ the assertion of a living 
Will ruling over the laws of nature. He had seen wonders 
and signs. Therefore he said, " We know that Thou art a 
teacher come from God :" he saw that Christ in these two 
senses fulfilled the two requisites of a Divine mission. He 
had seen a society growing up in acknowledgment of the 
rule of a person : but Christ told him that something more 
was needful than this: it was necessary that the subject 
should be prepared for the kingdom. It was not enough 
that God should draw nigh to man; but that man must 
draw near to God. There must be an alteration in the man. 
" Except a man be born again he can not enter the kingdom 
of God." 

In other words, he distinguished between a kingdom that 
is visible and a kingdom that is invisible. He distinguished 
between that presence of God which man can see, and that 
which man can only feel. This will explain apparent con* 
tradictions in Christ's lanGcuasre- 



700 Regeneration, 

To the Pharisee, on one occasion, He said, " If I by the 
finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God 
is come unto you." But again He said, " It is not lo here, 
nor lo there. For the kingdom of God is within you." 
There is a kingdom, therefore, in which the Eternal Spirit 
moves, whereof the senses take cognizance. Nicodemus saw 
that kingdom when he gazed on the miracles and outward 
signs, and felt that they were evidences, and from these and 
from the gathering society around the Lord, drew the con- 
clusion that no man could do these things except God were 
with him. 

There was the outward manifestation. But there is 
another kingdom which is the peculiar domain of the Spirit, 
which " eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered 
into the heart of man to conceive," into which flesh and 
blood can not enter. Of this kingdom Jesus said to Peter, 
" Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood hath 
not revealed it." And of this St. Paul said, " Now this I 
say, brethren, that flesh and blood can not inherit the king- 
dom of God." 

Unless an inward change takes place, though surrounded 
by God's kingdom, we can not enter into it. The eye, the 
ear, can take no cognizance of this ; it must be revealed by 
the Spirit to the spirit. 

Pass we on, secondly, to consider the entrance into this 
kingdom by regeneration. As there is a twofold kingdom, 
so is there a twofold entrance. 

1. By the baptism of water. 2. By the baptism of the 
Spirit. Now respecting the first of these, commentators 
have been greatly at variance. A large number of Prot- 
estant commentators have endeavored to explain this pas- 
sage away, as if it did not apply to baptism at all. But by 
all the laws of correct interpretation, we are compelled to 
admit that "born of water" has here a reference to baptism. 

Into God's universe or kingdom we penetrate by a double 
nature — by our senses and by our spirit. To this double 
nature God has made a twofold revelation. God's witness 
to our senses is baptism ; God's witness to our spirit is His 
Spirit. "He that believeth hath the witness in himself." 
Now let us observe the strength of that expression of Christ, 
" Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit he can 
not enter into the kingdom of God." A very strong expres- 
sion, but not more so than the baptismal service of the Church 
of England. "Born of water" is equivalent to regenera- 
tion by baptism. 

Thore are those who object to this formulary of our Church, 



Regeneration. 701 

because it seems to them to tell of a magical or miraculous 
power in the hands of the priest. In answer to them, we 
point to this passage of the inspired Word of God : let us 
try and understand in what sense it is true that a man is 
born of water. Now we hold baptism to be the sign, or 
proof, or evidence, of a spiritual fact. It is not the fact, but 
it substantiates the fact. 

The spiritual fact is God's covenant. Let us take an il 
lustration. The right of a man to his property is in riglit of 
his ancestor's will ; it is in virtue of that will or intention 
that the man inherits that property. But because that will 
is invisible, it is necessary that it should be made manifest 
in visible symbols ; and therefore there is a piece of parch- 
ment by which it is made tangible, and that, though only 
the manifestation of the w411, is called " the will " itself. 
Nay, so strongly is this word with its associations rooted in 
our language, that it may never have occurred to us that it 
is but a figurative expression ; and the law might, if it had 
been so chosen, have demanded another expression of the 
will. 

There have been cases in which a high-minded heir-at-law 
has accepted the verbal testimony of another to the inten- 
tions of his ancestor, where there has been no outward 
manifestation vrhatever, and so has given away the property 
because the inward will of his ancestor was to him all in 
all. ^ 

Similarly, baptism is the revealed will of God : that is, it 
is the instrument that declares God's will. God's will is a 
thing invisible ; verbally, the will runs thus — " Fear not, lit- 
tle flock, it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the 
kingdom." 

^' And just as the instrument which declares a will is called 
by a figure of speech " the will " itself, although it is but the 
manifestation of it, so the ecclesiastical instrument which de- 
clares regeneration is called regeneration in the Bible and in 
our Church service. Baptism is " regeneration " as a parch- 
ment is a " will ;" and, therefore it is that we read in this 
passage, " Bom of water ;" and therefore it is that St. Peter 
says, " Baptism saves us ;" and St. Paul says, " Buried with 
Christ in baptism." 

Lastly, we pass on to consider the entrance into this king- 
dom by a spiritual change. 

The ground on which Christ states it is our human nature. 
We have a twofold nature — the nature of the animal and the 
nature of God, and in the order of God's providence we begin 
with the animal. " Howbeit," says St. Paul^ " that is not first 



702 Regeneration. 

which is spiritual, but that which is natural." Now the mo 
ment when these natures are exchanged is the moraent of 
spiritual regeneration. 

A man is to be born of w^ater, but far rather of the Spirit. 
Of this expression there are several interpretations : first, 
the fanatical one. Men of enthusiastic temperaments, chiefly 
men whose lives have been irregular, w-hose religion has 
come to them suddenly, interpreting all cases by their owm 
experiences, have said that the exercise of God's Spirit is ever 
sudden and supernatural, and it has seemed to them that to 
try and bring up a child for God, in the w^ay of education, is 
to bid defiance to that Spirit w^hich is like the wind, blowing 
" where it listeth ;" and if a man can not tell the day or hour 
when he was converted, to those persons he does not seem to 
be a Christian at all. He may be holy, humble, loving, but 
unless there is that visible manifestation of how" and w^hen 
he was changed, he must be still ranked as unregenerate. 

Another class of persons, of cold, calm temperament, to 
whom fanaticism is a crime and enthusiasm a thing to be 
avoided, are perpetually rationalizing with Scripture, and 
explaining away in some low and commonplace w^ay the 
highest manifestation of the Spirit of God. Thus Paley tells 
us that this passage belongs to the Jew^s, who had forgotten 
the Messiah's kingdom ; but to speak of a spiritual, regen- 
erative change as necessary for a man brought up in the 
Church of England, is to open the door to all fanaticism. 

There is a third class, who confound the regeneration of 
baptism with that of the Spirit, who identify, in point of 
time, the being born of w^ater and of the Spirit. And it 
seems to them that regeneration after that is a word without 
meaning. Of this class there are two divisions : those who 
hold it openly in the Church of Rome, and those who do not 
go to the full extent of Romish doctrine on this subject. 
These will not say that a miracle has taken place, but they 
say that a seed of grace has thus been planted. Whichever 
of these views be taken, for all practical purposes the result 
must be the same. If this inward spiritual change has taken 
place at baptism, then to talk of regeneration after that must 
be an impertinence. But, brethren, looking at this passage, 
we can not be persuaded that it belongs to the Jew alone, 
nor can we believe that the strength of that expression is 
mere baptism by water. Here is recorded that w^hich is 
true not for the Jew or heathen only, but for all the human 
race, without exception. " Except a man be born of w^ater 
and of the Spirit, he can not enter the kingdom of God." 

In our lile there is a time in which our spirit has gained 



Regeneration, 703 

the mastery over the flesh ; it is not important to know 
when, but whether it has taken place. 

The first years of our existence are simply animal ; then 
the life of a young man is not that of mere instinct, it is a 
life of passion, with mighty indignations, strong aversions. 
And then passing on through life we sometimes see a person 
in whom these things are merged ; the instincts are there 
only for the support of existence ; the passions are so ruled 
that they have become gentleness, and meekness, and love. 
Between these two extremes there must have been a middle 
point, when the life of sense, appetite, and passion, which had 
ruled, ceased to rule, and was ruled over by the life of the 
spirit : that moment, whether it be long or short, whether it 
be done suddenly or gradually, whether it come like the 
rushing mighty wind, or as the slow, gentle zephyr of the 
spring — whenever that moment was, then was the moment 
of spiritual regeneration. There are cases in which this 
never takes place at all ; there are grown men and old men 
merely children still — still having the animal appetites, and 
living in the base, and conscious, and vicious indulgence of 
those appetites which in the child were harmless. These are 
they who have not yet been born again. Born of water they 
may have been, born of God's eternal Spirit they have not 
been ; before such men can enter into the eternal kingdom of 
their Father, that word is as true to them as to Nicodemus 
of old, " Marvel not that I said unto you. Ye must be born 
again." Oh ! it is an awful thing to see a spectacle such as 
that; an awful thing to see the blossom still upon the tree 
when the autumn is passed and the winter is at hand. An 
awful thing to see a man, who ought to be clothed in Christ, 
still living the life of the flesh and of passion : the summer is 
past, the harvest is ended, and he is not saved. 

Now let us briefly apply what has been said. 

1. Do not attempt to date too accurately the transition 
moment. 

2. Understand that the " flesh," or natural state, is wrong 
only when out of place. In its place it is imperfection, not 
evil. There is no harm in leaves or blossoms in spring — but 
in autumn ! There is no harm in the apj^etites of childhood, 
or the passions of youth, but great harm when these are still 
unsubdued in age. Observe, therefore, the flesh is not to be 
exercised, but the spirit strengthened. This I say then, 
" Walk in the spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lusts of the 
flesh." 

3. Do not mistake the figurative for the literal. 



\^-' 



704 An Election Sermon, 

Baptism is regeneration figuratively ; " The like figure 
whereunto even baptism doth also now save us (not the put- 
ting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good 
conscience toward God), by the resurrection of Jesus Christ." 

The things to be anxious about are not baptism, not 
confirmation ; but the spiritual facts for which baptism and 
confirmation stand. 



xn. 
AN ELECTION SERMON. 

A FRAGMENT. 



"And they appointed two, Joseph called Barsabas, who was surnamed 
Justus, and Matthias. And they prayed, and said, Thou, Lord, which know- 
est the hearts of all men, show whether of these two thou hast chosen, that 
he may take part of this ministry and apostleship, from which Judas by 
transgression fell, that he might go to his own place. And they gave forth 
their lots ; and the lot fell upon Matthias ; and he was numbered with the 
eleven apostles." — Acts i. 23-26. 

This is the account of the earliest appointment of an apos- 
tle or bishop over the Church of Christ. 

It stands remarkably distinguished from the episcopal 
elections of after ages. Every one acquainted with Church 
history knows that the election of a bishop in the first 
centuries, and indeed for many ages, was one of the bitterest 
and fiercest questions which shook the Church of Christ. 

[Appointment by the people — Presbyters — Various cus- 
toms. Anecdote of Ambrose of Milan. Appointment by 
the Emperor or Bishop of Rome. Quarrel of ages between 
the Emperor and the Pope.] 

Contradistinguished from this in spirit was the first ap- 
pointment which ended in the selection of Matthias. Holy, 
calm, wise — presided over by an apostolic and Christian 
spirit. 

It will be obvious at once why this subject has been 
selected. During the course of this week, England will be 
shaken to her centre with the selection of representatives 
who shall legislate for her hereafter, either in accordance 
with, or in defiance of, the principles of her constitution. In 
Bome places, as fiercely as the battle was formerly carried on 



An Election Sermon. 705 

between Guelph and Ghibelline, or betAveen faction and 
faction in the choice of bishops, so fiercely will the contest 
rage in the choice of representatives. 

Delicate and difficult as the introduction of such a sub- 
ject from the pulpit must be, yet it seems to me the im- 
perative duty of a minister of Christ — from w^hich he can 
not, except in cowardice, shrink — to endeavor to make clear 
the great Christian landmarks which belong to such an oc- 
currence. But let me be understood. His duty is not to m- 
troduce politics in the common sense of the word, meaning 
thereby the views of some particular party. The pulpit is 
not to be degraded into the engine of a faction. Far, far 
above such questions, it ought to preserve the calm dignity 
of a voice which speaks for eternity, and not for time. If 
possible, not one word should drop by which a minister's 
own political leanings can be discovered. 

Yet there must be broad principles of right and WTong in 
such a transaction, as in any other. And, in discharge of 
my duty, I desire to place those before you. We shall con- 
sider — 

I. The object of the election spoken of in my text. 
II. The mode of the election. 
III. The spirit in which it was conducted. 

I. The object of the election. To elect a bishop of the 
universal Church. 

It might be that in process of time the apostle so chosen 
should be appointed to a particular city — as St. James was 
to Jerusalem. But it is plain his duty as an apostle was 
owed to the general assembly and Church of Christ, and not 
to that particular city ; and if he had allowed local partiali- 
ties or local interests to stand before the interests of the 
whole, he would have neglected the duty of his high office. 

Also, that if those who appointed him considered the in- 
terest of Jerusalem in the first instance, instead of his quali- 
fications as a bishop of the Church universal, they would have 
failed in their duty. 

In the third century, a bishop of Carthage, Cyprian, in a 
celebrated sentence has clearly and beautifully stated this 
principle — '''' Episcopatus umcs est^ CKJus^^'' etc. The episco- 
pate, one and indivisible, held in its entirety by each bishop, 
every part standing for the whole. That is, if he w^ere a 
bishop of Carthage or Antioch, he was to remember that it 
was not the interests of Carthage over which he had to 
watch, but those of the Church of Christ; Carthage being 
his special allotment out of ^\\^ whole. And in a council 
z 



7o6 An Election Sermon, 

he was to give his voice not for that which might be good 
for the men of Carthage, but for the Church of Christ. 

The application is plain. 

The nation is one — its life is a sacred life. The nation 
is the Christian people, for whom Christ shed His blood — • 
its life is unity — its death is division. The curse of a Chris- 
tian is sectarianism — the curse of a nation is faction. Each 
legislator legislates for the country, not for a county or 
town. Each elector holds his franchise as a sacred trust, 
to be exercised not for his town, or for a faction of his town, 
not for himself, or his friends, but for the general weal of the 
people of England. 

Let me expose a common fallacy. 

We are not to be biased by asking what charity does a 
candidate support, nor what view does he take of some 
local question, nor whether he subscribe to tractarian or to 
evangelical societies. We are, in our high responsibility, 
selecting, not a president for a religious society, nor a patron 
of a town, nor a subscriber to a hospital, but a legislator for 
England. 

n. The mode of the election. 

It was partly human, partly Divine. The human element 
is plain enough in that it was popular. The choice lay not 
with the apostles, but with the whole Church. One hundred 
and twenty met in that upper chamber : all gave in their lots 
or votes. The Divine element lay in this, that it was over- 
ruled by God. 

Here is the main point observable. They at least took 
for granted that the popular element was quite separate from 
the Divine. The selected one might be the chosen of the 
people, yet not the chosen of God. Hence they prayed, 
" Thou, Lord, which knowest the hearts of all men, show 
whether of these two Thou hast chosen." 

The common notion is, vox populi vox D-ei. In other 
words, whatever the general voice wills is right. A law is 
right because it is a people's will. I do not say that we 
have got the full length of this idea in England. On the 
Continent it has long been prevalent. Possibly it is the ex- 
pression of that Antichrist " who showeth himself that he ia 
God;" self-will setting itself up paramount to the will of 
God. 

The vox populi is sometimes vox Dei^ sometimes not. 
The voice of the people was the voice of God when the chil- 
dren of Israel rescued Jonathan from his father's unjust sen* 
tence ; and when the contest between Elijah and the proph* 



An Election Sermon, 707 

ets of Baal having been settled, they cried, *' The Lord He \t 
God." 

"Was the voice of the people the voice of God when, in 
Moses's absence, they required Aaron to make them a gold- 
en calf for a god ? Or when, led on by the demagogue 
Demetrius, they shouted, " Great is Diana of the Ephesians ?" 
Or when, at the instigation of the priests, led blindfold by 
them they cried, " Crucify Him ?" 

The politicians of this world eagerly debate the question, 
how best to secure a fair representation of the people's voice, 
whether by individuals or by interests fairly balanced ? — a 
question, doubtless, not to be put aside. But the Christian 
sees a question deeper far than the^^s — not how to obtain 
most fairly an expression of the people's will, but how that 
will shall truly represent the will of God. There is no other 
question at last than this. 

And we shall attain this, not by nicely balancing interest 
against interest, much less by manoeuvring or by cunningly 
devised expedient, to defeat the cause Avhich we believe the 
wrong one ; but by each doing all that ni him lies to rouse 
himself and others to a high sense of responsibility. 

It is a noble thought, that of every elector going to vote, 
as these men did, for the Church, for the people, for God, 
and for the right, earnestly anxious that he and others should 
do right. 

Else — to speak humanly — this was an appeal to chance 
and not to God ; and every election, by ballot or by suf« 
frage, is else an appeal to chance. 

All, therefore, depends upon the spirit in which the election 
is conducted. 

What constitutes the difference between an appeal to God 
and an appeal to chance ? 

m. The Spirit. 

1. K religious ^^\v\l. " They prayed and said, Thou, Lord, 
which knowest the hearts of all men, show whether of these 
two Thou hast chosen." Xow, we shall be met here at once 
by an objection. This was a religious work — the selection 
of an apostle ; but the choice of a representative is not a re- 
ligious work, only a secular one. 

Here we come, therefore, to the very pith and marrow of 
the whole question. The distinction between religious and 
secular is true in a sense, but as we make it, it is false. It is 
not the occupation, but the spirit which makes the difference. 
The election of a bishop may be a most secular thing. Tha 
election of a representative may be a religious thing St, 



yoS An Election Sermon, 

Paul taught that nothing is profane. Sanctified by the 
Word of God and prayer, St. Peter learned that nothing is 
common or unclean. 

* ******* 

[Many relics remain to us from our religious forefathers 
indicative of this truth : Grace before meals ; Dei gratia on 
coins of the realms ; " In the name of God," at the commence 
ment of wills, oaths in court of justice ; prayers in universi' 
ties before election of scholars : all proclaim that the sim* 
plest acts of our domestic and political life are sacred or 
profane according to the spirit in which they are performed ; 
not in the question whether they are done for the State or 
the Church, but whether with God or without God.] 

Observ^e : it is not the preluding such an election with 
j)ublic prayer that would make it a religious act. It is re- 
ligious so far as each man discharges his part as a duty and 
solemn responsibility. 

If looked on in this spirit by the higher classes, would the 
debauchery and the drunkenness which are fostered by rich 
men of all parties among the poor for their own purposes, be 
possible? Would they, for the sake of one vote, or a hun- 
dred votes, brutalize their fellow-creatures ? 

2. It is implied in this, that it must be done cotiscien- 
tiously. 

Each Christian found himself in possession of a new right 
^that of giving a vote or casting a lot. 

Like all rights, it was a duty. He had not a right to do 
what he liked. His right was only the duty of doing right. 
And if any one had swayed him to support the cause of 
Barnabas or that of Matthias on any motives except this 
one — "You ought " — he had so far injured his conscience. 

The conscience of man is a holy, sacred thing. The worst 
of crimes is to injure a human conscience. Better kill the 
body. Remember how strongly St. Paul speaks, " When ye 
sin so against the brethren, and wound their weak conscience, 
ye sin against Christ." And that sin, remember, consisted in 
leading them to do a thing which, though right in itself, they 
thought wrong. 

Xow there is an oifense against the laws of the State which 
all men agree in treating with a smile. 

My brethren, bribery is a siii — a sin against God. Not 
because a particular law has been made against it, but be- 
cause it lowers the sense of personal responsibility, blunts 
the conscience, dethrones tlie God within the man's soul, and 
tvects selfishness, and greed, and mterest, in His stead. And 



An Electio7i Sermon^ 709 

whether you do it directly or indirectly — directly by giving, 
indirectly by withdrawing, assistance or patronage — you sin 
against Christ. 

3. It was not done from personal interest. 

There were two candidates, Barnabas and Matthias. Now 
if the supporters of these two had been influenced chiefly by 
such considerations as blood-relationship, or the chance of 
favor and promotion, manifestly a high function would have 
been degraded. 

In secular matters, however, we do not judge so. A man 
generally decides according to his professional or his person- 
al interests. You know almost to a certainty beforehand 
which way a man will vote, if you know his profession. If a 
man be a farmer, or a clergyman, or a merchant, you can 
pretty surely guess on which side he will range himself 

Partly, no doubt, this is involuntary — the result of those 
l^rejudices which attach to us all from association. But it is 
partly voluntary. We knoio that we are thinking not of 
the general good, but of our own interests. And thus a 
farmer would think himself justified in looking at a question 
simply as it affected his class, and a noble as it affected his 
caste, and a working-man as it bore upon the working- 
classes. 

Brethren, we are Christians. Something of a principle 
hipjher than this ouorht to be ours. What is the law^ of the 
cross of Christ ? The sacrifice of the One for the whole, the 
cheerful surrender of the few for the many. Else, what do 
we more than others ? 

These are fine words — patriotism, public principle, purity. 

Be sure these words are but sentimental expressions, ex- 
cept as they spring out of the cross of Christ. 

Application. 

I have endeavored to keep entirely unseen my own politi- 
cal views. I may have failed, but not voluntarily. 

Remember, in conclusion, the matter of paramount import- 
ance to be decided this week is, not whether a preponderance 
shall be insured for one of the great parties which divide the 
country or the other. That is important, but it is second- 
ary. The important thing to be devoutly wished is, that 
each man shall give his vote as these men did — conscientious- 
ly, religiously, unselfishly, lovingly. 

Better that he should support the wrong cause conscien- 
tiously than the right one insincerely. Better be a true 
man on the side of wrong, than a false man on the side of 
rio:ht. 



7IO Isaac Blessing his So7is. 



xin. 
ISAAC BLESSING HIS SONS. 

"And it came to pass, that when Isaac was old, and his eyes were dim, 
BO that he could not see, he called Esau his eldest son, and said unto him, 
My son : and he said unto him. Behold, here am I. And he said, Behold 
now, I am old, I know not the day of my death : now therefore take, I pray 
thee, thy weapons, thy quiver and thy bow, and go out to the field, and take 
me some venison ; and make me savory meat, such as I love, and bring it to 
me, that I may eat ; that my soul may bless thee before I die. " — Gen. xxvii. 1-4, 

In chapter xxv. we find Abraham preparing for death by 
a last will ; making Isaac his heir, and providing for his 
other children by giving them gifts while he yet lived, and 
so sending them out into the world. In this chapter, the 
heir himself is preparing to die. The rapidity with which 
these chapters epitomize life, bringing its few salient points 
together, is valuable as illustrative of what human existence 
is. It is a series of circles intersecting each other, but going 
on in a line. A few facts comprise man's life. A birth — a 
marriage — another birth — a baptism — a will — and then a 
funeral : and the old circle begins again. 

Isaac is about to declare his last will. It is a solemn act, 
in whatever light we view it, if it were only for the thought 
that we are writing words which will not be read till we are 
gone. But it is solemn, too, because it is one of those acts 
which tell of the immortal. First, in the way of prophetic 
prescience. Is it not affecting to think of a human being, not 
sick, nor in pain, with his natural force unabated, calmly sit- 
ting down to make arrangements for what shall be when he 
is in his last long sleep ? But the act of an immortal is visi- 
ble also in that a dead man rules the world, as it were, long 
after his decease. Being dead, in a sense he yet speaketh. 
He is yet present with the living. His existence is protracted 
beyond its natural span. His will is law. This is a kind of 
evidence of his immortality : for the obedience of men to what 
he has willed is a sort of recognition of his present being. 

Isaac was not left without warnings of his coming end. 
These warnings came in the shape of dimness of eyes and 
failing of sight. You can conceive a state in which man 
should have no warnings : and instead of gradual decay, 
should drop suddenly, without any intimation, into eternity. 
Such an arrancreraent might have been. But God has in 



Isaac Blessing his Sons, 711 

mercy provided reminders. For we sleep in this life of ours 
a charmed sleep, which it is hard to break. And if the road 
were of unbroken smoothness, with no jolt or shock, or un- 
evenness in the journey, we should move swiftly on, nothing 
breaking the dead slumber till we awake suddenly, like the 
rich man in the parable, lifting up our eyes in heaven or in 
hell. Therefore God has given these reminders. Some of 
them reorular — such as failino; of sig^ht, falling out of hair, de^ 
cay of strength, loss of memory — which are as stations in 
the journey, telling us how far we have travelled : others 
irregular — such as come in the form of sickness, bereave- 
ment, pain — like sudden shocks which jolt, arouse, and awaken. 
Then the man considers, and like Isaac, says, " Behold, I am 
old, I know not the day of my death." We will consider — 

I. Isaac's preparation for death. 
n. The united treachery of Jacob and Rebekah. 

1. Isaac's preparation for death. First, he longed for the 
performance of Esau's filial kindness as for a last time. Esau 
was his favorite son : not on account of any similarity be- 
tween them, but just because they were dissimilar. The re- 
pose, and contemplativeness, and inactivity of Isaac found a 
contrast in which it rested, in the energy and even the reck- 
lessness of his first-born. It was natui-al to yearn for the 
feast of his son's affection for the last time. For there is 
something peculiarly impressive in whatever is done for the 
last time. Then the simplest acts contract a kind of sacred- 
ness. The last walk in the country we are leaving. The 
last time a dying man sees the sun set. The last words of 
those from whom we have parted, which Ave treasure up as 
more than accidental, almost prophetic. The winding up of 

a watch, as the last act at nio-ht. The sis^nature of a will. 
-1- • ■ • • • 

In the life of Him in whom we find every feeling which be- 
longs to unperverted humanity, the same desire is found : a 
trait, therefore, of the heart which is universal, natural, and 
right. " With desire I have desired to eat this passover with 
you before I suffer. For I say unto you, I will not drink 
henceforth of the fruit of the vine until that day when I 
drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom." It was the 
Ijost Supper. 

2. By making his last testamentary dispositions. Appar- 
ently they were premature, but he did not defer them: part- 
ly because of the frailty of life, and the uncertainty whether 
there may be any to-morrow for that which is put off to-day : 
partly, perhaps, because he desired to have all earthly thoughts 
done with and put away. Isaac lived thirty or forty years 



7 1 2 Isaac Blessing his Sons. 

after this : but he was a man set apart : like one who in 
Roman Catholic lans^uao^e had received extreme unction, and 
had done with this world ; and when he came to die, there 
would be no anxieties about the disposition of property to 
harass him. It is orood to have all such thinors done with 
before that hour conies: there is something incongruous in 
the presence of a lawyer in the death-room, agitating the last 
hours. The first portion of our lives is spent in learning the 
use of our senses and faculties : ascertaining where we are and 
what. The second, in using those powers, and acting in the 
given sphere : the motto being, " Work, the night cometh." 
A third portion^ between active life and the grave, like the 
twilight between day and night, not light enough for work- 
ing, nor yet quite dark, which nature seems to accord for un- 
worldliness and meditation. It is striking, doubtless, to see 
an old man hale and vigorous to the last, dying at his work 
like a warrior in armor. But natural feeling makes us wish, 
perhaps, that an interval might be given : a season for the 
statesman, such as that which Samuel had, on laying aside 
the cares of office, in the schools of the prophets ; such as 
Simeon had, and Anna, for a life of devotion in the temple ; 
such as the laborer has when, his long day's work done, he 
finds an asylum in the almshouse ; such as our Church de- 
sires, where she prays against sudden death : a season of in- 
terval in which to watch, and meditate, and wait. 

n. The united treachery of Jacob and Rebekah. It was 
treachery in both; in one slen^se it was the same treachery. 
Each deceived Isaac and overreached Esau. But it would 
be a rough estimate to treat the two sins as identical. This 
is the coarse, common way of judging. We label sins as by 
a catalogue. We judge of men by their acts ; but it is far 
truer to say that we can only judge the acts by the man. 
You must understand the man before you can appreciate his 
deed. The same deed done by two different persons ceases 
to be the same. Abraham and Sarah both laughed when in- 
formed that they should have a son in their old age. But 
Sarah's was the laugh of skepticism ; the other, the result of 
that reaction in our nature by which the most solemn 
thoughts are balanced by a sense of strangeness or even 
ludicrousness. The Pharisees asked a sign in unbelief: 
many of the Old Testament saints did the same in faith. 
Fine discrimination is therefore necessary to understand the 
simplest deed. A very delicate analysis of character is nec- 
essary to comprehend such acts as these, and rightly to ap- 
portion their turpitude and their palliations. 



Isaac Blessing his Sons. 7 1 3 

In Rebekah's case the root of the treachery was ambition j 
but here we find a trait of female character. It is a woman's 
ambition, not a man's. Rebekah desired nothing for herself, 
but every thing for Jacob : for him spiritual blessing — at all 
events, temporal distinction. She did wrong, not for her 
own advantage, but for the sake of one she loved. Here is a 
touch of womanhood. The same is observable in the reck- 
lessness of personal consequences. So as only he might gain, 
she did not care. " Upon me be the curse, my son." And it 
is this which forces us, even while we must condemn, to com- 
passionate. Throughout the whole of this revolting scene of 
deceit and fraud, we can never forget that Rebekah was a 
mother. And hence a certain interest and sympathy are sus- 
tained. Another feminine trait is seen in the conduct of Re- 
bekah. It was devotion to a person rather than to a principle. 
A man's idolatry is for an idea, a woman's is for a person. A 
man suffers for a monarchy, a woman for a king. A man's mar- 
tyrdom differs from a woman's. Nay, even in their religion, 
personality marks the one, attachment to an idea or principle 
the other. Woman adores God in His 23ersonality, man adores 
Him in His attributes. At least that is, on the whole, the 
characteristic difference. 

Now here you see the idolatry of the woman : sacrificing 
her husband, her elder son, high principle, her own soul, for 
an idolized person. Remark that this was, properly speaking, 
idolatry. For in nothing is a greater mistake made than in 
the conception attached to that word in reference to the 
affections. A mother's affection is called, by many religious 
people, idolatry, because it is intense. Do not mistake. No 
one ever loved child, brother, sister, too much. It is not the 
intensity of affection, but its interference with truth and duty, 
that makes it idolatry. Rebekah loved her son more than 
truth, ^. e.,more than God. This was to idolize. And hence 
Christ says, " If any man love father or mother more than me, 
he is not worthy of me." You can only test that when a 
principle comes in the way. There are persons who would 
romantically admire this devotion of Rebekah, and call it 
beautiful. To sacrifice all, even principle, for another — what 
higher proof of affection can there be ? Oh, miserable sophis- 
try ! The only true affection is that which is subordinate to 
a higher. It has been truly said, that in those who love lit- 
tle, love is a primary affection ; a secondary one in those who 
love much. Be sure he can not love another much who lovea 
not honor more. For that higher affection sustains and ele« 
vates the lower human one, casting round it a glory whiclj 
mere personal feeling could never (jive. 



714 Isaac Blessing his Sons, 

Compare, for instance, Rebekah's love for Jacob with that 
of Abraham for his son Isaac. Abraham was ready to sacri- 
fice his son to duty. Rebekah sacrificed truth and duty to 
her son. Which loved a son most ? — which was the noblei 
love ? Even as a question of permanence, which would last 
the longer ? For consider what respect this guilty son and 
guilty mother could retain for each other after this : would 
not love turn into shame and lose itself in recriminations? 
For affection will not long survive respect, however it may 
protract its life by effort. 

Observe, again : monsters do not exist. When you hear 
of great criminality, you think of natures originally mon- 
strous, not like others. But none are liars for the sake of 
lying. None are cruel for cruelty's sake. It is simply 
want of principle that makes glaring sins. The best affec- 
tions perverted — that is the history of great crimes. See 
here : there is no touch of compunction from first to last. 
The woman seems all unsexed. She has no thought of her 
defrauded eldest son : none of her deceived husband. 
There is an inflexible pursuit of her object, that is all. It 
is wonderful how ambition and passion dazzle to all but the 
end desired. It is wonderful how the true can become 
false, and the tender-hearted hard and cruel for an end. 
Kor is this lesson obsolete. Are there no women who 
would do the same now? Are there none who would 
sacrifice a son's principles or a daughter's happiness to a 
diseased appetite for distinction ? Are there none who 
would conceal a son's extravagance, foster it, furnish it 
means unknown, or in an underhand way, in what is called 
the manoeuvring of fashionable life ; and do that for family 
advancement from which the strong sense and principle of 
a father would recoil and revolt ? And all this, not because 
they are monsters, but because their passion for distinction 
is inflamed, and their affections unregulated. 

Now look at Jacob's sin. He was not without ambition ; 
but he had not that unscrupulous, inflexible will which 
generally accompanies ambition and makes it irresistible. 
A bad man naturally he was not : nor a false man : but 
simply a pliable and weak man. Hence he became the 
tool of another — the agent in a plan of villainy which he 
had not the contrivance to originate. He was one of those 
who, if they could, would have what they wish innocently. 
He would not play false, yet he would unjustly have. He 
was rather afraid of doing the deceit than anxious that the 
deceit should not be done. Here Avas the guilt in its germ. 
He had indulged and pampered the fancy ; and be sure he who 



Isaac Blessing his Sons, 7 1 5 

wishes a temporal end for itself, does, or will soon, will the 
means. All temptations and all occasions of sin are power- 
less, except as far as they fall in with previous meditations 
upon the guilt. An act of sin is only a train long laid, fired 
by a spark at last. Jacob pondered over the desire of the 
blessing, dallied with it, and then fell. Now observe the 
rapidity and the extent of the inward deterioration. See 
how this plain, simple man, Jacob, becomes by degrees an 
accomplished deceiver ; how he shrinks at nothing ; how, 
at first unable to conceive the plan devised by another, he 
becomes at last inventive. At first the acted falsehood — a 
semblance ; then the lie in so many words ; then the 
impious use of the name, "The Lord thy God brought it 
me." How he was forced by fear and the necessities of 
begun guilt into enormity : deeper and deeper. Happy the 
man who can not, even from the faint shadows of his own 
experience, comprehend the desperate agony of such a 
state : the horror mixed with hardening effrontery with 
which a man feels himself compelled to take step after step, 
and is aware at last that he is drifting, drifting, from the 
great shore of truth — like one carried out by the tide against 
his will, till he finds himself at last in a sea of falsehood, his 
whole life one great dream of false appearance. 

Let us apply this briefly. 

Doubtless perverted good is always different from origi- 
nal vice. Li his darkest wanderings, one in whom the Spirit 
strives is essentially different from one who is utterly de- 
praved. Sensibility to anguish makes the difference, if 
there were nothing else. Jacob, lying in this way, plunging 
headlong, deeper and deeper, was yet a different man from 
one who is through and through hollow. Grant this — and 
yet that fact of human pervertibility is an awful fact and 
mystery. Innocence may become depraved : delicate purity 
may pass into grossness. It is an appalling fact. Trans- 
parency of crystal clearness may end in craft, double-deal- 
ing, contrivance. Briefly, therefore — 

1. Learn to say " No." 

2. Beware of those fancies, those day-dreams, which repre- 
sent things as possible which should be forever impossible. 
Beware of that affection which cares for your happiness more 
than for your honor. 

Lastly, in the hour of strong temptations, throwing our- 
selves off self, distrusting ourselves, let us rest in Him who, 
having been tempted, knows what temptation is ; who " will 
not suffer us to be tempted above that Ave are able, but will 
with the temptation also make a way to escape, that we ma^ 
be able to bear it.*' 



7x6 Salvation out of the Visible Church. 



xrv. 
SALVATION OUT OF THE VISIBLE CHURCIL 

"Now there was at Joppa a certain disciple named Tabitha, which by m. 
terpretation is called Dorcas : this woman was full of good works and aim:*. 
deeds which she did," etc. — Acts ix. 36. 

" There was a ceitain man in Ceesarea called Cornelius, a centurion of the 
band called the Italian band," etc. — Acts x. 1. 

Two events are connected with St. Peter's stay at Joppa: 
the miraculous restoration of Dorcas, and the vision which 
prepared for the reception of Cornelius into the Christian 
Church. The apostle was at Lydda, when he was summoned 
by the news of the death of Dorcas to Joppa, about twelve 
miles distant. Now observe here the variety of the gifts 
which are bestowed upon the Christian Church. Four 
characters, exceedingly diverse, are brought before us in 
this ninth chapter : Paul, a man singularly gifted, morally 
and intellectually, with qualities more brilliant than almost 
ever fell to the lot of man ; Peter, full of love and daring, a 
champion of the truth ; Ananias, one of those disciples of the 
inward life whose vocation is sympathy, and who, by a single 
word, " brother," restore light to those that sit in darkness 
and loneliness ; lastly, Dorcas, in a humbler, but not less true 
sphere of divine goodness, clothing the poor with her own 
hands, practically loving and benevolent. 

We err in the comparative estimate we form of great and 
small. Imagine a political economist computing the value 
of such a life as this of Dorcas. He views men in masses : 
considers the economic well-being of society on a large 
scale : calculates what is productive of the greatest good for 
the greatest number. To him the few coats and garments 
made for a few poor people would be an item in the world's 
well-being scarcely worthy of being taken into the reckoning. 
Let the historian estimate her worth. The chart of time lies 
unrolled before him. The fall of dynasties and the blending 
together of races, the wars and revolutions of nations that 
have successively passed across the world's stage — these are 
the things that occupy him. What are acts like hers in the 
midst of interests such as these and of contemplations so 
large ? All this is beneath the dignity of history. Or again, 
let us summon a man of larger contemplations still. To the 



Salvation otit of the Visible Church, 7 1 7 

dstronomer, lifting his clear eye to the order of the stars, this 
planet itself is but a speck. To come down from the universe 
to the thought of a tiny earth is a fell descent ; but to de- 
scend to the thought of a humble female working at a few 
garments, were a fall indeed. 

Now rise to the Mind of w^hich all other minds are but 
emanations — and this conception of grand and insignificant 
is not found in His nature. Human intellect, as it rises to 
the great, neglects the small. The Eternal mind condescends 
to the small ; or rather, with It there is neither great nor 
small. It has divided the rings of the earthworm with as 
much microscopic care as the orbits in which the planets 
move : It has painted the minutest feather on the wing of 
the butterfly as carefully as It has hung the firmament with 
the silver splendor of the stars. Great and small are words 
w^hich have only reference to us. 

Further still : judging the matter by the heart, ascending 
to the heart of God, there is another aspect of the subject : 
great belongs only to what is moral — infinitude and eternity 
are true of feelings rather than of magnitude, or space, or 
time. The mightiest distance that mind can conceive, cal- 
culable only by the arrow-flight of light, can yet be meas- 
ured. The most vast of all the cycles that imagination ever 
wanted for the ages that are gone by, can yet be estimated 
by number. But tell us, if you can, the measure of a single 
feeling. Find for us, if you can, the computation by which 
we may estimate a single spiritual affection. The:v ^^'^ abso- 
lutely incommensurable — these things together, magnitude 
and feeling. Let the act of Dorcas be tried thus. When 
the world has passed away, and the lust thereof, "he that 
doeth the will of God abideth forever." The true infinite, 
the real eternal, is love. When all that economist, historian, 
philosopher can calculate, is gone, the love of Dorcas will 
still be fresh, and livino^, in the eternity of the illimitable 
Mind. . . 

Observe, once more, the memorial which she left behind 
her. When Peter w^ent into the upper chamber, he was 
surrounded by the poor widows, who showed him, w^eeping, 
the garments she had made. This was the best epitaph : the 
tears of the poor. 

There is a strange jar upon the mind in the funeral, when 
the world is felt to be going on as usual. Traffic and pleas- 
ure do not alter Avhen our friend lies in the upper chamber. 
The great, busy world rolls on, unheeding, and our egotism 
suggests the thought. So will it be w^hen I am not. This 
World, whose very existence seems linked with mine, and to 



7 1 8 Salvation out of the Visible Churc/i. 

subsist only in mine, will not be altered by my dropping out 
of it. Perhaps a few tears, and then all that follow me and 
love me now will dry them up again. I am but a bubble on 
the stream : here to-day, and then gone. This is painful to 
conceive. It is one of the pledges of our immortality that 
we long to be remembered after death ; it is quite natural. 
Now let us inquire into its justice. 

Dorcas died regretted : she was worth regretting, she was 
worth being restored ; she had not lived in vain, because she 
had not lived for herself The end of life is not a thought, 
but an action — action for others. But you, why should you 
be regretted ? Have you discovered spiritual truth, like 
Paul ? Have you been brave and true in defending it, like 
Peter ? or cheered desolate hearts by sympathy, like Ananias ? 
or visited the widows and the fatherless in their affliction, 
like Dorcas ? If you have, your life w^ll leave a trace behind 
which will not soon be effaced from earth. But if not, what 
is your worthless, self-absorbed existence good for, but to be 
swept away, and forgotten as soon as possible ? You will 
leave no record of yourself on earth, except a date of birth, 
and a date of death, with an awfully significant blank be- 
tween. 

The second event connected with St. Peter's stay at Joppa 
was the conversion of Cornelius. 

A new doctrine was dawning on the Church. It was the 
universality of the love of God. The great controversy in 
the early history of Christianity was, not the atonement, not 
predestination, not even, except at first, the resurrection, but 
the admissibility of the Gentiles to the Chui'ch of Christ. 
It was the controversy between Christianity, the universal 
religion, and Judaism, the limited one. Except we bear this 
in mind, the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles will be 
alike unintelligible to us. 

The germ of this truth had been planted by Stephen. St. 
Paul was now raised up as his successor, to develop it still 
further. So that now a very important crisis had arrived. 
For it has been well observed, that had St. Peter's accept- 
ance of this truth been delayed by leaving it to gradual 
jraental growth, the effects would have been incalculably dis- 
astrous to Christianity. A new apostle had arisen, and a 
new church was established at Antioch ; and had St. Peter 
and the rest been left in their reluctance to this truth, the 
younger apostle would have been necessarily the leader of a 
party to which the elder apostles w^ere opposed, and the 
Church of Antioch would have been in opposition to the 
Church at Jerusalem : a timely miracle, worthy of God, pre- 



Salvation out of the Visible Church, 7 1 g 

vented this catastrophe : at the very crisis of time St. Peter's 
mind, too, was enlightened with the truth. 

The vision was evidently in its form and in its direction 
the result of previous natural circumstances. The death of 
Stephen must have had its effect on the apostle's mind. 
That truth for which he died, the transient character of 
Judaism, must have suggested strange new thoughts, to be 
pondered on and doubted on ; add to this, the apostle was 
in a state of hunger. In ecstasy, or trance, or vision, things 
meet for food presented themselves to his mental eye. Evi- 
dently the form in which this took place was shaped by his 
physical cravings, the direction depended partly upon his 
previous thoughts concerning the opening question of the 
Church. But the eternal truth, the spiritual verity conveyed 
by the vision, was clearly of a higher source. Here are the 
limits of the natural and the supernatural closely bordering 
on each other. 

And this is only analogous to all our life. The human 
touches on the Divine, earth borders upon heaven — the lim- 
its are not definable. " I live," said St. P^ul. Immediately 
after, he corrects himself: "yet not I, but Christ liveth in 
me." Man's spirit prays ; yet is it not " the Spirit making 
intercession for us with groanins^s which can not be uttered ?'* 
As if the mind of man were hardly to be distinguished from 
the mind of God. We are on the brink of the world unseen 
— on the very verge of the spirit-realm. Everywhere around 
us is God. 

Now the contents of this vision were — a vessel let down 
from heaven, full of animals, domestic and wild, clean and 
unclean. This was let down from heaven, and taken up to 
heaven again. All had come from God, so that the truth 
conveyed was clear enough. These distinctions of clean and 
unclean were but conventional and artificial, after all — tem- 
poral arrangements, not Ijelonging to the unalterable. God 
had made all and given all. The analogy was not difficult 
to perceive. God is the Creator of mankind. He is the 
universal Father. All have come from Him. Sanctified by 
Him, there can be no man common or unclean. 

Against even the first part of this St. Peter's mind revolt- 
ed^" Not so. Lord." It is not a little remarkable that the 
two first to whom this expansive truth was revealed were 
bigoted men : St. Paul the Jewish, St. Peter the Christian 
bigot. For St. Peter was a Christian, yet a bigot still. Is 
this wonderful and rare ? or are we not all bigots in our 
way, the largest-minded of us all? St. Peter was willing to 
admit a proselyte ; the admission of an entire Gentile was ^ 



720 Salvation out of the Visible Church, 

stumbling-block; afterwards he could admit a Gentile, but 
hesitated to eat with him. There are some of us who can 
believe in the Christianity of those who are a little beyond 
our own Church pale ; some who even dimly suspect that God 
may love the Jew ; some, too, who will be ready, with quali- 
fications, to acknowledge a benighted Roman Catholic for a 
brother; but how many of us are there who would not be 
startled at being told to love a Unitarian ? how many who 
would not shrmk from the idea as over-bold, that he who is 
blind to the Redeemer's Deity, yet loving Him with all his 
heart, may perchance have that love accepted in place of 
adoration, and that it may be at our peril that we call him 
" common or unclean ?" Oh ! there was a largeness in the 
heart of Christ, of which we have only dreamed of as yet — 
a something, too, in these words, " God hath showed me that 
I should not call any man common or unclean," which it wdll 
require, perhaps, ages to develop." 

At the same, or nearly the same time when this was taking 
place at Joppa, a manifestation, somewhat similar, was going 
on at Csesarea, a day's journey distant. Remark here the 
coincidence. There was an affinity, it seems, between the 
minds of these two men, Peter and Cornelius — a singular, 
mysterious sympathy. Nay, more than that, very shortly 
before, a similar phenomenon had been felt in th^ mind of St. 
Paul, more than a hundred miles off, in a valley near Damas- 
cus ; concerning all which we can say little, except that it is 
very plain there is a great deal more going on upon earth 
than our ordinary life conceives of In the scientific world, 
similar coincidences perpetually take place : discoveries, ap- 
parently unconnected, without any apparent link between 
the minds which make them, are announced from different 
parts of the world almost simultaneously. No man, perhaps, 
has been altogether unconscious of mental sympathies, coin- 
cidences of thought, which are utterjy inexplicable. All that 
I deduce from this is the solemn awfulness of the universe in 
which we live. We are surrounded by mystery. Mind is 
more real than matter. Our souls and God are real. Of the 
reality of nothing else are w^e sure: it floats before us, a fan- 
tastic shadow-world. Mind acts on mind. The Eternal 
Spirit blends mind with mind, soul with soul, and is moving 
over us all with His mystic inspiration every hour. 

In Cgesarea there w^as a cohort of soldiers, the body-guard 
of the governor who resided there. They were not, as was 
the case in other towns, provincial soldiers, but, being a 
gxiard of honor, were all Romans, called commonly the Ital- 
ian band. One of the centurions of this guard was Cornelius 



Salvation out of the Visible Church. 721 

— " a devout man." A truth-loviDg, truth-seeking, truth-find- 
ing man ; one of those who would be called in this day a 
restless, perhaps an unstable man ; for he changed his religion 
twice.^ He had aspirations which did not leave him content- 
ed with paganism. He found in Judaism a higher truth, and 
became a proselyte. In Judaism he wa^ true to the light he 
had : he was devout, gave alms, and even influenced some of 
the soldiers of the guard, as it would appear (ver. 7)- The 
result was as might have been expected. "He that hath, 
to him shall be given." Give us such a man, and we will 
predict his history. He will be ever moving on ; not merely 
changing, but moving on, from higher to higher, from light; 
to light^from love to love, till he loses himself at last in the 
Fountain of Light and the Sea of Love. Heathenism, Juda- 
ism, Christianity. Not mere change, but true, ever upward 
progress. He could not rest in Judaism, nor anywhere else 
on earth. 

To this man a voice said, " Thy prayers and thine alms 
are come up as a memorial before God." Prayers — that we 
can understand ; but alms — are then works, after all, that by 
which men become meritorious in the sight of God ? To 
answer this, observe : Alms may assume two forms. They 
may be complete or incomplete. Alms complete — works 
which may be enumerated, estimated — deeds done and put 
in as so much purchase — ten times ten thousand such will 
never purchase heaven. But the way in Avhich a holy man 
does his alms is quite different from this. In their very per- 
formance done as pledges of something more ; done with a 
sense of incompleteness ; longing to be more nearly perfect 
— they become so many aspirations rising up to God ; sacri- 
fices of thanksgiving, ever ascending like clouds of incense, 
that rise and rise in increasing volumes, still dissatisfied and 
still aspiring. Alms in this way become prayers — the high- 
est prayers ; and all existence melts and resolves itself into a 
prayer. " Thy prayers and thine alms ;" or if you will, " Thy 
prayers and thy prayers," are come up to be remembered ; 
for what were his alms but devout aspirations of his heart to 
God? 

Thus, in the vision of the everlasting state which John sa^v 
in Patmos, the life of the redeemed presented itself as one 
eternal chant of grateful hallelujahs, hymned on harps whose 
celestial melodies float before the Throne forever. A life of 
prayer is a life whose litanies are ever fresh acts of self-devot- 
ing love. There was no merit in those alms of Cornelius j 
they were only poor imperfect aspirations, seeking the eax 
of God, and heard and answered there 



722 Salvation out of the Visible Church, 

All this brings us to a question which must not be avoided 
— the salvability of the heathen world. Let us pronounce 
upon this, if firmly, yet with all lowliness and modesty. 

There are men of whose tenderness of heart we can not 
doubt, who have come to the conclusion that without doubt 
the heathen shall perish everlastingly. A horrible conclu- 
sion : and if it were true, no smile should ever again pass 
across the face of him who believes it. No moment can, 
with any possible excuse, be given to any other enterprise 
than their evangelization, if it be trUe that eternity shall 
echo with the myriad groans and agonies of those who are 
dropping into it by thousands in an hour. Such men, how- 
ever, save their character for heart at the expense of their 
consistency. They smile and enjoy the food and light just 
as gayly as others do. They are too afiectionate for their 
creed ; their system only binds their views ; it can not con- 
vert their hearts to its gloomy horror. 

We lay down two principles : No man is saved by merit, 
but only by faith. No man is saved, except in Christ. 
" There is none other name under heaven given among men 
whereby we must be saved." 

But when we come to consider what is saving faith, we 
find it to be the broad principle of trust in God, above all 
misgivings, living for the invisible instead of the seen. In 
Hebrews xi. we are told that Noah was saved by faith. 
Faith in what?- In the atonement? or even in Christ? 
Nay, but in the predicted destruction of the world by water; 
the truth he had, not the truth he had not. And the life he 
led in consequence, higher than that of the present-seeking 
world around him, was the life of faith, " by the which he 
condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness 
which is by faith." Salvation, therefore, is annexed to faith. 
Not necessarily faith in the Christian object, but in the 
truth, so far ao it is given. Does God ask more? 

Again : the Word revealed itself to men before it was 
manifested in tlie flesh. Before this universe was called into 
being, when neither star nor planet was, the Father was not 
alone. From all eternity He contemplated Himself in 
Another — Himself in Himself; else God had not been love. 
For another is required for love. To lose and find one's self 
again in another's being, that is love. Except this, we can 
not conceive love possible to Him. But thus with the other, 
which was His very self; in language theological, the Eter- 
nal Son in the bosom of the Father ; God thrown into objec- 
tivity by Himself There was a universe before created uni- 
verse existed ; there wa^ love when as yet there was no?'.^ 



Salvation out of the Visible Churc/i, 723 

except Himself on whom that affection could be thrown; 
and the expression of Himself to Himself, the everlasting 
Word, filled eternity with the anthem of the Divine solilo- 
quy. Now this word expressed itself to man before it mim 
gled itself with flesh. " Before Abraham was, I am." Read 
we not in the Old Testament of revelations made to men in 
visions, trances, day-dreams, sometimes in voices, articulate 
or inarticulate, sometimes in suggestions scarcely distin- 
guishable from their own thoughts ? 

Moreover, recollect that the Bible contains only a record 
of the Divine dealings with a single nation ; His proceedings 
with the minds of other people are not recorded. That large 
other world — no less God's world than Israel was, though in 
their bigotry the Jews thought Jehovah was their own ex- 
clusive property — scarcely is — scarcely could be named on 
the page of Scripture except in its external relation to Israel. 
But at times, figures, as it were, cross the rim of Judaism, 
when brought in contact with it, and passing for a moment 
as dim shadows, do yet tell us hints of a communication and 
a revelation going on unsuspected. We are told, for exam- 
ple, of Job — no Jew, but an Arabian emir, who beneath the 
tents of Uz contrived to solve the question to his heart which 
still perplexes us through life — the co-existence of evil with 
Divine benevolence ; one who wrestled with God as Jacob 
did, and strove to know the shrouded Name, and hoped to 
find that it Avas love. We find Naaman the Syrian, and 
Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian, under the providential and 
loving discipline of God. Rahab the Gentile is saved by 
faith. The Syrophenician woman by her sick daughter's 
bedside, amidst the ravings of insanity, recognizes, without 
human assistance, the sublime and consoling truth of a uni 
versal Father's love in the midst of apparent partiality. The 
"Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the 
world " had not left them in darkness. 

From all this we are constrained to the conviction that 
there is a Church on earth larger than the limits of the 
Church visible ; larger than Jew, or Christian, or the Apostle 
Peter, dreamed ; larger than our narrow hearts dare to hope 
even now. They whose soarings to the First Good, First 
Perfect, and First Fair, entranced us in our boyhood, and 
whose healthier aspirations are acknowledged yet as bur in- 
Gti'HCtors in the reverential qualities of our riper manhood — • 
will our hearts alloio us to believe that they have perished ? 
Nay. " Many shall come from the east and west, and shall 
sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the king- 
dom of heaven." The North American Indian who wor 



724 The Word and the World, 

shipped the great Spirit, and was thereby sustained in a life 
more dignified than the more animalized men amongst his 
countrymen ; the Hindoo who believed in the rest of God, 
and in his imperfect way tried to " enter into rest," not for- 
getting benevolence and justice — these shall come, while 
"the children of the kingdom" — men who, with greater 
light, only did as much as they — " shall be cast out." 

These, with an innumerable multitude whom no man can 
number, out of every kingdom, and tongue, and people, with 
Rahab and the Syrophenician woman, have entered into 
that Church which has passed thr'ough the centuries, absorb- 
ing silently into itself all that the world ever had of great, 
and good, and noble. They were those who fought the bat- 
tle of good against evil in their day, penetrated into the in- 
visible from the thick shadows of darkness w^hich environed 
them, and saw the open Vision which is manifested to all, in 
every nation, who fear God and work righteousness — to all, 
in other words, who live devoutly towards God, and by love 
towards man. And they shall hereafter " walk in white, for 
they are w^orthy." * * * * It may be that I err in this. It 
may be that this is all too daring. Little is revealed upon 
the subject, and we must not dogmatize. I may have erred ; 
and it may be all a presumptuous dream. But if it be, God 
will forgive the daring of a heart whose hope has given birth 
to the idea ; whose faith in this matter simply receives its 
substance and reality from things hoped for, and whose con- 
fidence in all this dark, mysterious world can find no rock to 
rest upon amidst the roaring billows of uncertainty, except 
" the length, and the breadth, and the depth, and the height, 
of the love which passeth knowledge," and which has filled 
the universe with the fullness of His Christ. 



XV, 
THE WORD AND THE WORLD. 

*'And H same to pass, that, while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul having 
r'assed through the upper coasts came to Ephesus ; and finding certain disci- 
ples, he said unto them. Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye beheved? 
And they said unto him, We have not so much as heard whether there be 
any Holy Ghost," etc. — Acts xix. 1, 2. 

We consider, to-day, the nineteenth chapter of the Acta 
of the Apostles, but first we must make some preliminary 
remarks. 



The Word ajid the World. 725 

The second missionary journey of St. Paul was done, and 
he had left Europe for Asia. The object of his travel was 
threefold. 1. To complete in the temple of Jerusalem the 
vow which he had begun at Corinth (xviii. 18, 21). 2. To 
visit Antioch, the mother-church of Gentile Christianity, 
where his presence was much needed (xviii. 22). 3. To re- 
visit the churches of Galatia, and strengthen those who had 
been tempted by false teaching in his absence (xviii. 23). 

The last two of these objects were connected with one sin- 
gle point of interest. It was the Jewish controversy, which 
was then at its height. The council of Jerusalem had de- 
cided that a Gentile was not dependent for salvation on the 
Jewish law (xv. 23-29). But another question remained 
still open : Was a Christian who did not obey the law on 
the same level as a Christian who did obey it ? Was it not 
a superior religious standing-ground, to add the ritual life 
to the life of faith ? 

With this question the whole of the Epistle to the Gala- 
tians is occupied. That epistle does not deal with the ques- 
tion, whether the ritual law is necessary for salvation ; but 
with this — whether a Gentile Christian became a higher man 
than before by a ceremonial life; whether, in St. Paul's words, 
" having begun in the spirit," he could be " made perfect 
through the flesh." 

At Antioch that question assumed a practical form. The 
Jewish and Gentile Christians had lived in harmony, until 
certain zealous ritualists came from Jerusalem, where St. 
James presided. Then a severance took place. The law-ob- 
serving disciples admitted these new converts to be Chris- 
tians, but would not admit their standing in the Church to 
be equal to their own. They denied their complete brother- 
hood. They refused to eat with them. A Christian, not ob- 
serving the ceremonial* law, was to a Christian who did ob- 
serve it very much what a proselyte of the gate was to an 
ancient Jew. 

Two men of leading station yielded to this prejudice, 
though it was destructive of the very essence of Christianity. 
These were St. Peter and Barnabas. The " dissimulation," 
as St. Paul calls it, of these two apostles suggests two in- 
structive lessons. 

The yielding of Barnabas reminds us of the insecurity of 
mere feeling. Barnabas was a man of feeling and fine sensi- 
bilities. He could not bear to have his relative Mark severe- 
ly judged (Acts XV. 36-39, and Col. iv. 10). It pained him 
to the heart to see that Paul, when he first essayed to join 
himself to his disciples^ was misunderstood (Acts ix. 2^, 27). 



726 The Word and the World, 

He was a " son of consolation." He sold his property to dis- 
tribute to the Christian poor (Acts iv. 36, 37). He healed 
many a broken heart. But he wanted just that firmness 
which men of feeling so often want — the power of standing 
steadily by a principle. 

The unsteadiness of St. Peter exhibits a different truth. 
It tells that a fall, however it may qualify a man for giving 
advice to others similarly tempted, does not qualify for future 
consistency, nor for the power of showing mercy in the high- 
est way. No doubt St. Peter's fall, after his conversion, pe- 
culiarly fitted him for strengthening his brethren. But sin 
weakens the power of resistance. He who yields once will 
more easily yield the second time. He who shrunk from 
standing by his Master found it fearfully easy to shrink from 
abiding by a principle. Sin indulged breaks down the bar- 
riers between good and evil, and turns strength into weak- 
ness ! And failure does not make men merciful to others. 
St. Peter is just as hard to the Gentile Christians, expelling 
them from Christian society for that which he knew to be in- 
different, as if he had always been firm in his own integrity. 
He only can judge of error and show mercy, who has been 
" tempted, yet without sin." This nineteenth chapter is di- 
visible into three chief subjects : 

I. The baptism of John's disciples. 
n. The burning of the " Ephesian letters." 
HI. The tumult occasioned by the worshippers of Diana. 

I. When St. Paul came to Ephesus, he found twelve disci- 
ples of John, bearing the name of Christians, but having a 
very imperfect form of Christianity. Now the baptism of 
John, which was all these men kncAV, means the doctrine of 
John — that cycle of teaching which is briefly symbolized by 
the chief ritual act of the system. The system of John was 
contained in a very narrow range of truth. It was such 
truth as we might have expected from a man who had been 
so disciplined. It was John's lot to be born into the world 
in a period of highly-advanced society ; and in that hot-bed 
of life-fictions, Jerusalem, the ardent mind of the young man 
found nothing to satisfy the cravings of its desire. He want- 
ed something deeper and truer than the existing systems 
could afford him. He went to the Sadducee and the Phari- 
see in vain. He found no life in the Jewish ritual — no assist- 
ance from the rabbis. He went into the wilderness to 
commune with God, to try what was to be learned from Him 
by a soul in earnest, without church, ministers, or ordi- 
nances. The heavens spoke to him of purity, and the river by 



The Word and the World, 727 

Mj5 side of God's eternity. Locusts and honey, his only food, 
taught him that man has a higher life to nourish than that 
which is sustained by epicurean luxuries. So disciplined 
John came back to his countrymen. As might be expected, 
no elaborate theology formed any part of his teaching. " We 
want a simpler, purer, austerer life. Let men be reaL 
Fruits worthy of repentance — fruits, fruits, not profession. 
A new life. Repent." That was the burden of John*a 
message. 

A preparatory one evidently, one most incomplete in itself. 
It implied the need of something additional, as St. Paul told 
these converts. " John verily baptized with the baptism of 
repentance, saying unto the people that they should believe 
on Him who should come after him, that is, on Christ Jesus." 
And none felt more distinctly than John that his was mere* 
ly an initial work. That was a touching acknowledgment of 
the subordinate part he had to perform in the construction of 
the world's new life. " He must increase, but I must de- 
crease." The work of John was simply the work of the axe. 
" The axe is laid to the root of the trees ;" to destroy, not to 
build ; to cut up by the roots ancient falsehoods ; to tear 
away all that was unreal ; to make a clearance that the light 
of day might come in. A great work, but still not the great- 
est. 

And herein lay the difference between the two baptisms. 
John baptized with water, Christ with the Holy Ghost and 
fire. The one was simply the washing away of a false and 
evil past ; the other was the gift of the power to lead a pure, 
true life. 

This was all that these disciples knew ; yet remark, they 
are reckoned as Christians. They are called " certain disci- 
ples " — that is, of Jesus. They knew little enough of Chris- 
tianity ; they had not so much as heard whether there be 
any Holy Ghost. The doctrine of the Trinity they knew 
not, nor that of sanctification, nor probably that of the atone- 
ment. And yet in the Word of God they are called disci- 
ples of Christ. 

Let us learn from that a judgment of charity. Let not 
the religious man be too prone to talk with contempt of a 
legal spiritc Let him not sneer at "merely moral men." 
Morality is not religion, but it is the best soil on which re- 
ligion grows. He who lives an honest, sincere, honorable 
life, and has strong perceptions of moral riirht and moral 
wrong, may not have reached the highest stages of spiritual- 
ity; he may "know only the baptism of John;" he may 
aim as yet at nothing higher than doing his duty well, "ao 



728 The Word and the World. 

casing no man falsely, being content with his wages," giving 
one coat out of two to the poor; and yet that man, wdth 
scanty theology and small spiritual experience, may be a 
real "disciple" in the school of Christ, and one of the chil- 
dren of the Highest. 

Nay, it is the want of this preparation which so often 
makes religion a sickly plant in the soul. Men begin with 
abundance of spiritual knowledge ; they understand well the 
"scheme of salvation ;" they talk of religious privilege, and 
have much religious liberty ; they despise the formal spirit 
and the legal spirit. But if the foundation has not been laid 
deep in a perception of the eternal difference between right 
and wrong, the superstructure will be but flimsy. I believe 
it is a matter of no small importance that the baptism of 
John should precede the baptism of Christ ; that is, that a 
strict life, scrupulous regularity, abhorrence of evil — perhaps 
ev^en something too austere, the usual accompaniment of sin- 
cerity at the outset — should go before the peace which comes 
of faith in Christ. First the blade, then the ear, then the full 
corn in the ear. You can not have the harvest first. There 
is an order in the development of the soul, as there is in the 
development of the year of nature, and it is not safe \.o force. 
Nearly two thousand years were spent in the Divine gov- 
ernment in teaching the Jews the meaning of holiness, the 
separation of right from wrong. And such must be the or- 
der of the education of children and of men. The baptism 
of repentance before the baptism of the Spirit. 

The result which followed this baptism was the gifts of 
tongues and prophecy. On a former occasion I endeavored to 
explain what is meant by the gift of tongues. It appeared, 
then, that " tongues " were not so much the power of speaking 
various languages, as the power of speaking spiritual truths 
with supernatural and heavenly fervor. This passage favors 
that interpretation. The apostle was there with twelve new 
converts. To what purpose was the supposed use of various 
languages among such a number, who already understood 
one another? It would seem more like the showing off of 
a new accomplishment than the humble character of Chris- 
tian modesty permits. If this gift simply made them lin- 
guists, then the miracle was of a temporary and earthly 
character. But if it consisted in elevating their spiritual in- 
tuitions, and enabling them to speak, " not in the words 
w^hich man's wisdom teacheih, but which the Holy Ghost 
teacheth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual," then 
you have a miracle — celestial indeed, worthy of its Spirit- 
Author. If it were only a gift of languages, then the mira- 



The Word and the World, 729 

cle has nothing to do with us ; but if it were the elevating 
of the natural faculties by God's Spirit to a higher and di- 
viner use, then we have a marvel and a truth which belongs 
to all ages. The life is the light of men. Give life, and 
light follows. Expand the heart, and you enlarge the intel- 
lect. Touch the soul with love, and then you touch the lips 
with hallowed fire, and make even the stammering tongue 
3peak the words of living eloquence. 

This was the gift of tongues that followed the reception 
of the Divine Spirit. 

II. The second subject in the chapter is the burning of 
the " Ephesian letters." 

Ephesus was the metropolis of Asia. Its most remarkable 
feature was the temple of Diana — one of the wonders of the 
world. It contained a certain image, misshapen, of a human 
form, reported by tradition to have fallen from the skies; 
perhaps one of those meteoric stones, which, generated in the 
atmosphere, and falling to the ground, are reckoned by the 
vulgar to be thunderbolts from heaven. 

This image represented Nature, the prolific nurse and 
source of all life, and the worship was a worship of Nature. 
Upon the base of the statue were certain mysterious sen- 
tences, and these, copied and written upon papers and amu- 
lets, were known far and wide by the name of " Ephesian 
letters." This was the heathen form of magical superstition. 
But it seems there was a Jewish practice of the occult art 
besides. They used certain incantations, herbs, and magi- 
cal formulas, said by tradition to have been taught by Sol- 
omon, for the expulsion of diseases and the exorcism of evil 
spirits. 

The state of Ephesus, like that of Corinth and Athens, was 
one of metropolitan civilization ; and it is nothing strange 
that in such a stage of social existence, arts and beliefs like 
these should flourish; for there is always a craving in the 
soul of man for something supernatural, an irrepressible de- 
sire for communion with the unseen world. And where an 
over-refined civilization has choked up the natural and 
healthy outlets of this feeling, it will inevitably find an un- 
natural one. The restless spirit of those times, dissatisfied 
with their present existence, in spite of itself feeling the deg- 
radation of the life of epicurean indolence and selfishness, 
instinctively turned to the other world in quest of marvels. 
We do not wonder to find atheism and abject superstition 
co-tenants of the same town or the same mind. We do not 
Qiarvel that in the very city where reasonable Christianity/ 



730 The Word and the World, 

could scarcely find a footing, a mob could be found scream.' 
ing for two hours, " Great is Diana of the Ephesians !" that 
when men had " not so much as heard whether there be any- 
Holy Ghost," wise men and men in authority should be be- 
lievers in " the image which fell down from Jupiter." Ephe- 
sus was exactly the place where Jewish charlatans and the 
vendors of " Ephesian letters " could reap a rich harvest from 
the credulity of skeptical voluptuaries. 

It is difficult to know what to say about this Oriental 
magic. Shall we say that it was all imposture ? or account 
for its success by the power of a highly-excited imagination? 
or believe that they were really making use of some unknown 
powers of nature, Avhich they themselves in ignorance sup- 
posed to be supernatural ? Little can now be decided. 
That the magicians themselves believed in their own art is 
plain, from the fact of the existence of these costly " Ephesian 
letters," and scientific " curious books," which had appar- 
ently reached the dignity of an elaborate system ; and also 
from the fact that some of them, as the seven sons of Sceva, 
believed in Christianity as a higher kind of magic, and at- 
tempted to use its formula, as more efficacious than their 
own. "We adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preachetb." 
Had they been only impostors, they would have taken Paul 
for an impostor too. 

Here was one of those early attempts, which in after ages 
became so successful, to amalgamate Christianity with the 
magical doctrines. Gnosticism was the result in the East, 
Romanism the result in the West. 

But the spirit of Christianity brooks no amalgamation. 
The essence of magic consists in this : the belief that by 
some external act — not connected with moral goodness, nor 
making a man wiser or better — communication can be in- 
sured with the spiritual world ; and the tutelage of God or 
some superior spirit be commanded for a mortal. It mat- 
ters not whether this be attempted by Ephesian letters, 
amulets, charms, curious books — or by sacraments, or by 
Church ordinances or priestly powers — whatever professes to 
bring God near to man, except by making man more like to 
God, is of the same spirit of Antichrist. 

The spirit-world of God has its laws, and they are unal- 
terable. They are such as these : " Blessed are the pure in 
heart, for they shall see God ;" " Blessed are the merciful — 
the peacemakers — the meek — the poor in spirit ;" " If any 
man will do His will, he shall know ;" " If a man love Me 
he will keep My words : and My Father will love him, and 
We will come unto him. and make our abode with him." 



The Word and the World. 731 

rhis is Christianity. There is no way of becoming a par- 
taker of " the powers of the w^orld to come," except by hav- 
ing the heart right with God. God's presence, God's pro- 
tection, is the privilege of the humble, the holy, the loving. 
These are the laws of the kingdom of God's Spirit, and no 
magic can reverse them. The contest was brought to an 
issue by the signal failure of these magicians to work a mir- 
acle — the man possessed leaped upon the exorcisers, and they 
fled wounded, upon which there was great consternation in 
Ephesus. The possessors of curious books came, confessed 
their guilt, and burnt them with their own hands in the 
apostle's presence. 

You will observe in all this the terrible supremacy of 
conscience. There w^as struck a chord deep in the moral 
nature of these men, and it vibrated in torture. They could 
not bear their own secret, and they had no remedy but im- 
mediate confession. It is this arraigning accuser within the 
bosom that compels the peculator, after years of concealed 
theft, to send back the stolen money to his employer, with 
the acknowledgment that he has suffered years of misery. 
It was this that made Judas dash down his gold in the 
Temple, and go and hang himself It is this that again and 
again has forced the murderer from his unsuspected security 
in social life, to deliver himself up to justice, and to choose 
a true death rather than the dreadful secret of a false life. 
Observe how mightily our moral nature works — for health 
and peace, if there be no obstruction ; but for disease and 
torture, if it be perverted. But, anyhow, it works, and with 
living, indestructible force, as the juices of vigorous life, if 
obstructed, create and feed gigantic disease. 

Consider, in the next place, the test of sincerity furnished 
by this act of burning the Ephesian letters. First of all it 
was a costly sacrifice. They were valued at fifty thousand 
pieces of silver. In those days, copies were not multiplied 
by printing ; and the possessor of a secret would take care 
not to multiply it. Rarity created costliness. The posses- 
sion of one such book was the possession of a fortune. Then, 
again, there was the sacrifice of livelihood. By these books 
they got their living. And a man who had lived to thirty 
or forty years of age in this mode of life was not young- 
enough to begin the w^orld again with a new profession. It 
was to throw themselves almost into beggary. Moreover, 
it was the destruction of much knowledge that was really 
valuable. As in the pursuit of alchemy real chemical se- 
crets were discovered, so it can not be doubted that these 
curious manuscripts contained many valuable natural facts. 



73^ The Word and the World, 

To burn them was to waste all these — to give the lore an- 
cumulated for years to the winds. 

Once more: it was an outrage to feeling. Costly manu- 
scripts, written with curious art, many of them probably the 
heirlooms of a family, many which were associated with a 
vast variety of passages in life, old feelings, old teachers 
and companions, these were to be committed mercilessl}^ to 
the flames. Remember, too, how many other ways there 
were of disposing of them. Might they not be sold, and the 
proceeds " given to the poor ?" Might they not at least be 
made over to some relative who, not feeling any thing wrong 
in the use or possession of them, would not have his con- 
science aggrieved ? Or might they not be retained, the use 
of them being given up, as curious records of the past, as the 
treasure-stores of so much that was beautiful and wise ? 

And then conscience arose with her stern, clear voice. 
They are the records of an ignorant and guilty past. There 
must be no false tenderness ; the sacrifice must be real, or it 
is none. To the flames with them, till their ashes are strew- 
ed upon the winds, and the smoke will rise up to heaven a 
sweet savor before God. 

Whoever has made such a sacrifice as this — and every 
real Christian in the congregation in some shape or other 
has — will remember the strange medley of feeling which ac- 
companied the sacrifice. We should err if we expected such 
a deed to be done with feelings entirely single. There is a 
mixture in all such sacrifices. Partly fear constrained the 
act, produced by the judgment on the other exorcists; part- 
ly genuine remorse ; partly there was a lingering regret as 
leaf after leaf perished in the flames ; partly a feeling of re- 
lief, and partly a heavy sense of loss in remembering that 
the work of years was obliterated, and that the past had to 
be lived afresh as a time wasted ; partly shame, and partly 
a wild tumult of joy, at the burst of new hope, and the pros- 
pect of a nobler life. We can not, and dare not, too closely 
scan such things. The sacrifice was made, and He who 
knows the mixture of the earthly and the spiritual in His 
creatures' hearts doubtless accepted the sacrifice. 

There is no Christian life that has not in it sacrifice, and 
that alone is the sacrifice which is made in the spirit of the 
conflagration of the "Ephesian letters," without reserve, 
without hesitation, without insincere tenderness. ^ If the 
slaveholder, convinced of the iniquity of the traflic in man, 
sells the slaves on his estate to the neighboring planter, the 
mark of sincerity is wanting ; or if the trader in opium or in 
spirits quits his nefarious commerce, but first secures the 



The Word and the World. 733 

value of all that remains in his warehouse or in his shijjs, 
again there is a something which betokens the want of a 
heart true and honest; or if the possessor of a library 
becomes convinced that certain volumes are unfit for his 
shelves, immoral, polluting the mind of him that reads them, 
and yet can not sacrifice the brilliant binding and the costly 
edition without an equivalent, what shall we say of these 
men's sincerity ? 

Two things marked these Ephesians' earnestness — the vol- 
untariness of their confession, and the unreserved destruction 
of these records and means of evil. And I say to you, if there 
be a man here before me with a sin upon his heart, let him 
remember conscience will arise to do her dreadful work at 
last. It may be when it is too late. Acknowledgment at 
once, this is all that remains for him to relieve his heart of 
its intolerable load. If he has wronged a man let him ac- 
knowledge it and ask forgiveness; if he has defrauded him 
of his due, or kept him from his rights, let him repair, restore, 
make up ; or, if the guilt be one with which man inter- 
meddleth not, and of which God alone takes cognizance, on 
his bended knees this night, and before the sun of to-morrow 
dawn, let him pour out the secret of his heart, or else, it may 
be that in this world, and in the world to come, peace is ex- 
iled from his heart forever. 

III. "We shall consider, thirdly, the sedition respecting Di- 
ana's worship. First under this head let us notice the speech 
of Demetrius — in which observe : 

1„ The cause of the slow death which error and falsehood 
die : shot through and through, they still linger on. Existing 
abuses in Church and State are upheld because they are in- 
tertwined with private interests. The general good is im- 
peded by private cupidity. The welfare of a nation, the es- 
tablishment of a grand principle, is clamored against because 
destructive of the monopoly of a few particular trades. The 
salvation of the world must be arrested that Demetrius may 
continue to sell shrines of Diana. This is the reason why it 
takes centuries to overthrow an evil, after it has been proved 
an evil. 

2. The mixture of religious and selfish feelings. Not only 
" our craft," but also the worship of the great goddess Diana. 
Demetrius was, or thought himself sincere ; a man really 
zealous for the interests of religion. And so it is with many 
a patriotic and religious cry. " My country " — " my church " 
— " my reliLHon " — it supports me. " By this craft we have 
our wealth." 



734 '^^^ Word and the World, 

3. Numbers are no test of truth. What Demetrius said, 
and the town-clerk corroborated, was a fact — that the whole 
world worshipped the great goddess Diana. Antiquity, uni- 
versality, popularity, were all on her side ; on the other, there 
were only Paul, Gains, Aristarchus. If numbers tested truth, 
Apollos in the last chapter need not have become the brilliant 
outcast from the schools of Alexandria, nor St. Paul stand in 
Ephesus in danger of his life. 

He who seeks Truth must be content with a lonely, little- 
trodden path. If he can not worship her till she has been 
canonized by the shouts of the multitude, he must take his 
place with the members of that wretched crowd who shout- 
ed for two long hours, " Great is Diana of the Ephesians !" 
till truth, reason, and calmness were all drowned in noise. 

Let us notice the judicious speech of the town-clerk, or 
chamberlain more properly, in which observe — 

1. The impression made by the apostle on the wiser and 
calmer part of the community. The Asiarchs, or magistrates, 
were his friends. The town-clerk exculpated him, as Gallio 
had done at Corinth. Herein we see the power of consis- 
tency. 

2. The admitted moral blamelessness of the Christians. 
Paul had not " blasphemed " the goddess. As at Athens, he 
had not begun by attacking errors, or prejudices, or even su- 
perstitions. He preached truth, and its effect began to be 
felt already, in the decline of the trade which flourished by 
the sale of silver models of the wondrous temple — a statistical 
fact, evidencing the amount of success. Overcome evil by 
good, error by truth. Christianity — opposed by the force of 
governments, counterfeited by charlatanism, sneered at by 
philosophers, cried down by frantic mobs, coldly looked at 
from a distance by the philosophical, pursued with unrelent- 
ing hatred by Judaism, met by unions and combinations of 
trades, having arrayed against it every bad passion of human- 
ity — went swiftly on, conquering and to conquer. 

The continental philosophers tell us that Christianity is 
effete. Let this narrative determine. Is that the history of 
a principle which has in it seeds of death ? Comes that from 
the invention of a transient thought of man's, or from the 
Spirit of the everlasting ages ? 



Solomon s Restoratio7i. 735 



XVI. 
SOLOMON'S RESTORATION. 

"Did not Solomon king of Israel sin by these things? yet among many 
nations was there no king like him, who was beloved of his' God. " — Nehem. 
xiii. 26. 

There is one study, my Christian brethren, which never 
can lose its interest for us so long as we are men : and that 
is, the investigation of human character. The deep interest 
of biography consists in this — that it is in some measure the 
description to us of our own inner history. You can not un- 
veil the secrets of another heart without at the same time 
finding something to correspond with, and perchance explain, 
the mysteries of your own. Heart answers here to heart. 
Between the wisest and the worst there are ten thousand 
points of marvellous resemblance ; and so the trials, the frail- 
ties, the bitterness of any human soul, faithfully traced out, 
ever shadow out to us a portraiture of our own experience. 
Give but the inner heart-history of the most elevated spirit 
that ever conquered in life's struggle, and place it before the 
most despicable that ever failed, and you exhibit to him so 
much of the picture of his own very self, that you perforce 
command his deepest attention. Only let the inarticulate 
life of the peasant find for itself a distinct voice and a true 
biographer, let the inward struggles which have agitated 
that rough frame be given faithfully to the world, and there 
is not a monarch whose soul will not be thrilled with those 
inner details of an existence with which outwardly he has not 
a single thought in common. 

It is for this reason that Solomon's life is full of painful 
interest. Far removed as he is, in some respects, above our 
sympathies, in others he peculiarly commands them. He 
was a monarch, and none of us know the sensations which 
belong to rule. He w^as proclaimed by God to be among 
the wisest of mankind, and few of us can even conceive the 
atmosphere in which such a gifted spirit moves, original, in- 
quiring, comprehending, one to whom Nature has made her 
secret open. He lived in the infancy of the world's society, 
and we live in its refined and civilized manhood. 

And yet, brethren, when we have turned away wearied 
from all those subjects in which the mind of Solomon expati- 
ated, and try to look inward at the man^ straightway we 



"j^i^ Solomon s Restoration, 

find ourselves at home. Just as in our own trilling, petty 
history, so we find in him, life with the same unabated, mys- 
terious interest ; the dust and the confusiori of a battle, sub- 
lime longings, and low weaknesses, j^erplexity, struggle ; and 
then the grave closing over all this, and leaving us to marvel 
in obscurity and silence over the strange destinies of man. 
Humbling, brethren, is all this, at the same time that it is 
most instructive. God's strange dealings with the human 
heart, when shall they cease their interest for us ? When 
shall it be that life, wdth all its mysteries, will tire us to 
look upon ? When shall it be that the fate of man shall 
cease to w^ake up emotion in man's bosom. 

Xow, we are to bear in mind that the career of Solomon is 
a problem which has perplexed many, and is by no means an 
easy one to solve. He belongs to the peculiar class of those 
who begin well, and then have the biightness of their lives 
obscured at last. His morning sun rose beautifully ; it sank 
in the evening, clouded, and dark with earthy exhalations — 
too dark to prophesy with certainty how^ it should rise on 
the morrow. 

Solomon's life was not what religious existence ought to 
be. The life of God in the soul of man ought to be a thing 
of perpetual development ; it ought to be more bright, and 
its pulsations more vigorous every year. Such, certainly, at 
least to all appearance, Solomon's was not. It was excel- 
lence, at all events, marred with inconsistency. It was orig- 
inal uprightness disgraced by a fall, and that fall so prolong- 
ed and signal that it has always been a disputed question 
among commentators Avhether he ever rose from it again at 
all. But the passage which I have selected for the text, in 
connection with one or two others, seems to decide this ques- 
tion. " Did not Solomon king of Israel sin by these things ?" 
that is, marriage with foreign Avives ? " Yet among many 
nations was there no king like him who was beloved of his 
God.'' Now there can be no doubt of the view given us in 
this verse. Six hundred years after Solomon had been sleep- 
ing in earthly dust, when all contemporaries were dead, and 
all personal feeling had passed away, when history could 
pronounce her calm verdict upon his existence as a whole, 
Xehemiah, in this passage, gave a summary of his character. 
He speaks to us of Solomon as a saint — a saint in whom 
saintliness had been wonderfully defaced — imperfect, tempt- 
ed, fallen; but still ranked among those whom God's love 
had pre-eminently distinguished. 

Now let us compare with this the prophecy which had 
been uttered by Nathan before Solomon was born. Thus 



Solomon s Restoration. 737 

he spoke in God's name to David of the son who was to suc- 
ceed him on the throne : " I will be his father, and he shall 
be my son. If he commit iniquity, I will chasten him with 
the rod of men," — i. e., the rod as a human being uses it, for 
correction, not everlasting destruction — " and with the stripes 
of the children of men. But ray mercy shall not depart away 
from him, as I took it from Saul." In this we have a distinct 
covenant, made prophetically. God foretold Solomon's terri- 
ble apostasy ; and with it He foretold Solomon's restoration. 
And there is one point especially remarkable. He parallels 
Solomon's career with Saul's. Saul began well, and Saul 
ended ill. Just so it was with Solomon. Here was the par- 
allel. But farther than this, God distinctly warned, the par- 
allel did not go. Saul's deterioration from good was perma- 
nent. Solomon's deterioration, dark as it was, had some 
point of essential difference. It was not forever. Saul's life 
darkened from morning brightness into the gloom of ever- 
lasting night. Solomon's life darkened too, but the curtain 
of clouds was rolled aside at last, and before the night set in 
the sun shone out in serene, calm brilliancy. 

We take up, therefore, for our consideration to-day, the life 
of Solomon in these two particulars. 

I. The wanderings of an erring spirit. " Did not Solomon 
king of Israel sin by these things ?" 

II. The guidance of that spirit, amidst all its wanderings, 
by God's love. " There was no king like unto him who was 
beloved of his God." 

I. " Did not Solomon king of Israel sin by these things ?" 
This is the first point for us to dwell on — the wanderings of 
a frail and erring human spirit from the right way. That 
which lay at the bottom of all Solomon's transgressions was 
his intimate partnership with foreigners. " Did not Solomon 
sin by these things ?" that is, if we look to the context, mar- 
riage with foreign wives. The history of the text is this : 
Nehemiah discovered that the nobles of Judah during the 
Captivity, when law and religious customs had been relaxed, 
had married wives of Ashdod, of Ammon, and of Moab ; and 
then, in his passionate expostulation with them, he reminds 
them that it was this very transgression which led to the 
fall of the monarch who had been most distinguished for 
God's favor. In the whole Jewish system, no principle was 
more distinct than this — the separation of God's people from 
partnership with the world. Exclusiveness was the princi- 
ple on w^hich Judaism was built. The Israelites were not to 
mix with the nations; they were not to marry with them; 
2 A 



"j^S Solomo7i^s Restoration, 

they were not to join with them in religious fellowsliip or 
commercial partnership. .Every thing was to be distinct — 
as distinct as God's service and the world's. And it was this 
principle which Solomon transgressed. He married a prin- 
cess of Egypt. He connected himself with wives from idola- 
trous countries — Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, 
Hittites. And then Xehemiah's argument, built on tlie eter- 
nal truth that friendship with the world is enmity with God, 
is this : " Did not Solomon sin by these things ?" 

That Jewish law, my brethren, shadowed out an everlast- 
ing truth, God's people are an exclusive nation; God's 
Church is forever separated from the world. This is her 
charter, " Come out from among them, and be ye separate, 
saith the Lord, and touch not the nnclean thing ; and I will 
receive you, and will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be 
my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty." God's 
people may break that charter, but they do it at their own 
peril. And we may be very sure of this, when a religious 
person begins to feel an inclination for intimate communion 
with the world, and begins to break down that barrier which 
is the line of safety, the first step is made of a series of long, 
dark wanderings from God. AYe are to be separate, breth- 
ren, from the world. Mistake not the meaning of that word. 
The world changes its complexion in every age. Solomon's 
world was the nations of idolatry lying round Israel. Our 
world is not that. The Avorld is that collection of men in 
every age who live only according to the maxims of their 
time. The world may be a profligate world, or it may be a 
moral world. All that is a matter of accident. Our world 
is a moral world. The sons of our world are not idolaters, 
they are not profligate, they are, it may be, among the most 
fascinating of mankind. Their society is more pleasing, more 
lively, more diversified in information than religious society. 
No marvel if a young and ardent heart feels the spell of the 
fascination. Xo wonder if it feels a relief in turning away 
from the dullness and the monotony of home life to the 
sparkling brilliancy of the world's society. No marvel if 
Solomon felt the superior charms of the accomplished Egyp- 
tian and the wealthy Tyrian. His Jewish countrymen and 
countrywomen were but homely in comparison. What won- 
der if the young monarch felt it a relaxation to emancipate 
himself from the thraldom of a society which had little to 
interest his grasping and restless mind, and to throw himself 
upon a companionship which had more of refinement, and 
more of cultivation, and more of that enlargement of mind 
which his own gifted character was so fitted to enjoy ? 



Solomon s Restoration. 73Q 

It is no marvel, brethren. It is all most natural, all most 
intelligible — a temptation which we feel ourselves every 
day. The brilliant, dazzling, accomplished world — what 
Christian with a mind polished like Solomon's does not own 
its charms ? And yet now, pause. Is it in wise Egypt that 
our highest blessedness lies ? Is it in busy restless Sidon ? 
Is it in luxurious Moab ? No, my Christian brethren. The 
Christian must leave the world alone. His blessedness lies 
in quiet work Avith the Israel of God. His home is in that 
deep, unruffled tranquillity which belongs to those who are 
trying to know Christ. And when a Christian will not learn 
this — when he will not understand that in calmness, and 
home, and work, and love, his soul must find its peace — when 
he will try keener and more exciting pleasures — when he 
says, I must taste what life is while I am young, its feverish- 
ness, its strange, delirious, maddening intoxication, he has 
just taken Solomon's first step, and he must take the whole 
of Solomon's after, and most bitter experience, along with it. 

The second step of Solomon's wandering Avas the unre- 
strained pursuit of pleasure. And a man like Solomon can 
not do any thing by halves. What he did, he did thorough- 
ly. No man ever more heartily and systematically gave 
himself up to the pursuit. If he once made up his mind 
that pleasure was his aim, then for pleasure he lived. There 
are some men who are prudent in their epicureanism. They 
put gayety aside Avhen they begin to get palled with it, and 
then return to it moderately again. Men like Solomon can 
not do that. No earnest man can. No ; if blessedness lies 
in pleasure, he will drink the cup to the dregs. Listen to 
what he says : " I sought in mine heart to give myself unto 
wine, yet acquainting mine heart with wisdom ; and to lay 
hold on folly, till I might see what was that good for the 
sons of men, which they should do under the heaven all the 
days of their life." That was a pursuit of pleasure Avhich 
was at least decided and systematic — manly. Observe, 
brethren, we have none of the cool, cautious sipping of en- 
joyment there. We have none of the feeble, languid at- 
tempts to enjoy the world which make men venture ankle- 
deep into dissipation, and only long for courage to go a lit- 
tle farther. It is the earnestness of an impassioned man, a 
man who has quitted God, and thrown himself, heart and 
soul, upon every thing that he tries, and says he will try it 
fairly and to the full. 

" Let us see what the world is worth." Perhaps some 
minds amongst us now are not altogether strangers to a 
feeling such as this. There is many a soul, formed for high- 



740 Solomon s Restoration, 

er and better things, that has, at one time or another, lost 
its hold on God, and felt the impulse of its own desires urg- 
ing it on forever, dissatisfied, restless, j^anting for a celestial 
fruit which seems forbidden, and half expecting to find that 
fruit in life's excitement. These are the wanderings of an 
erring spirit. 

But, my brethren, let us mark the wanderings of an im- 
mortal soul infinite in its vastness. There is a moral to be 
learnt from the wildest worldliness. When we look on the 
madness of life, and are marvelling at the terrible career of 
dissipation, let there be no contempt felt. It is an immortal 
spirit marring itself It is an infinite soul, which nothing 
short of the Infinite can satisfy, plunging down to ruin and 
disappointment. Men of pleasure, whose hearts are as ca- 
pable of an eternal blessedness as a Christian's, that is the 
terrible meaning and moral of your dissipation, God in 
Christ is your only Eden, and out of Christ you can have 
nothing but the restlessness of Cain ; you are blindly pursu- 
ing your destiny. That unquenched impetuosity within you 
might have led you up to God. You have chosen instead 
that your heart shall try to satisfy itself upon husks. 

There was another form of Solomon's worldliness. It 
w^as not worldliness in pleasure, but worldliness in occupa- 
tion. He had entered deeply into commercial speculations. 
He had alternate fears and hopes about the return of his 
merchant-ships on their perilous three-years' voyage to India 
and to Spain. He had his mind occupied with plans for 
building. The architecture of the Temple, his own palace, 
the forts and towns of his now magnificent empire, all this 
filled for a time his soul. He had begun a system of nation- 
al debt and ruinous taxation. He had become a slaveholder 
and a despot, who was compelled to keep his people down 
by armed force. Much of this was not wrong, but all of it 
was dangerous. It is a strange thing how business dulls the 
sharpness of the spiritual afiections. It is strange how the 
harass of perpetual occupation shuts God out. It is strange 
how much mingling with the world, politics, and those things 
which belong to advancing civilization — things whicli are 
very often in the way of our duty — deaden the delicate sense 
of right and wrong. Let Christians be on their guard by 
double prayerfulness when duty makes them men of business 
or calls them to posts of worldly activity. Solomon did 
things of questionable morality which he never would have 
done if he had not had the ambition to distinguish himself 
among the princes of tliis world. Business and worldliness 
dried up the springs of his sj)irituality. It was the climax 



Solomon s Restoration. 741 

of Solomon's transgression that he sntfered the establishment 
of idolatry in his dominions. 

There are writers who have said that in this matter Solo- 
mon was in advance of his age — enlightened beyond the nar- 
rowness of Judaism, and that this permission of idolatry w^as 
the earliest exhibition of that spirit which in modern times 
we call religious toleration. But, my brethren, Solomon 
went far beyond toleration. It is written, when Solomon 
was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods ; 
for he went after Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Zidonians, 
and after Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites. The 
truth seems to be, Solomon was getting indifferent about re- 
ligion. He had got into light and worldly society, and the 
libertinism of his associations was beginning to make its im- 
pression upon him. He was beginning to ask. Is not one re- 
ligion as good as another, so long as each man believes his 
ow^n in earnest ? He began to feel there is a great deal to be 
said for these different religions. After all, there is nothing cer- 
tain ; and why forbid men the quiet enjoyment of their own 
opinion ? And so he became what men call liberal, and he 
took idolatry under his patronage. There are few signs in a 
soul's state more alarming than that of religious indifference, 
that is, the spirit of thinking all religions equally true — the 
real meaning of Avhich is, that all religions are equally false. 

II. We are to consider, in the last place, God's loving 
guidance of Solomon in the midst of all his apostasy. My 
Christian brethren, in the darkest, wildest wanderings, a man 
to Avhom God has shown his love in Christ is conscious still 
of the better way. In the very gloom of his remorse there 
is an instinctive turning back to God. It is enumerated 
among the gifts that God bestowed on Solomon, that He 
granted to him " largeness of heart." Now that largeness 
of heart which we call thoughtfulness and sensibility, gen- 
erosity, high feeling, marks out, for the man who has it, a 
peculiar life. Life becomes an intense thing : if there be 
guilt, then his life will be desolating remorse ; if love, then 
the very ecstasy of blessedness. But a cool, commonplace 
life he can not have. According to Scripture phraseology, 
Solomon had a great heart ; and therefore it was that for 
such a one the discipline which was to lead him back to God 
must needs be terrible. " If he commit iniquity, I will chas- 
ten him with the rod of men." That was God's covenant, 
and with tremendous fidelity was it kept. 

You look to the life of Solomon, and there are no outward 
reverses there to speak of His reign was a type of the reign 



742 Solomon s Restoration, 

of the power of peace. No war, no national disaster, inter- 
rupted the even flow of the current of his days. No loss of 
a child, like David's, pouring cold desolation into his soul — 
no pestilences nor famines. Prosperity and riches, and the 
internal development of the nation's life, that was the reign 
of Solomon. And yet, brethren, with all this, was Solomon 
happy ? Has God no arrows winged in heaven for the heart, 
except those which come in the shape of outward calamity? 
Is there no way that God has of making the heart gray and 
old before its time, without sending bereavement, or loss, or 
sickness? Has the Eternal Justice no mode of withering 
and drying up the inner springs of happiness, while all is 
green, and wild, and fresh outwardly ? We look to the his- 
tory of Solomon for the answer. 

The first way in which his aberration from God treasured 
up for him chastisement, was by that weariness of existence 
which breathes through the w^hole book of Ecclesiastes. 
That book bears internal evidence of having been written 
after repentance and victory. It is the experience of a ca- 
reer of pleasure ; and the tone which vibrates through the 
whole is disgust with the world, and mankind, and life, and 
self. I hold that book to be inspired. God put it into the 
heart of Solomon to make that experience public. But, my 
brethren, by " inspired," I do not mean that all the feelings 
to which that book gives utterance are right or holy feel- 
ings. St. John could not have written that book. St. John, 
who had lived in the atmosphere of love, looking on this 
world as God looks on it — calmly, with the deep peace of 
heaven in his soul, at peace with himself, and at peace with 
man — could never have penned the book of Ecclesiastes. 
To have written the book of Ecclesiastes a man must have 
been qualified in a peculiar way. He must have been a man 
of intense feeling — large in heart, as the Bible calls it. He 
must have been a man who had drunk deep of unlawful 
pleasure. He must have been a man in the upper ranks of 
society, with plenty of leisure and plenty of time to brood 
on self Therefore, in saying it is an inspired book, I mean 
the inspired account of the workings of a guilty, erring, and 
yet, at last, conquering spirit. It is not written as a wise 
and calm Christian would write, but as a heart would write 
which was fevered with disappointment, jaded with passion- 
ate attempts in the pursuit of blessedness, and forced to God 
as the last resource. 

My younger brethren, that saddest book in all the Bible 
stands before you as the beacon and the warning from a God 
who loves you, and would spare you bitterness if He could. 



Solomon s Restoration, 743 

Follow inclination now, put no restraint on feeling — say that 
there is time enough to be religious by-and-by — forget that 
now is the time to take Christ's yoke upon you, and learn 
gradually and peacefully that serene control of heart which 
must be learnt at last by a painful wrench — forget all that, 
and say that you trust in God's love and mercy to bring all 
right, and then that book of Ecclesiastes is your history. 
The penalty that you pay for a youth of pleasure is, if you 
have any thing good in you, an old age of weariness and re- 
morseful dissatisfaction. 

Another part of Solomon's chastisement was doubt. Once 
more turn to the book of Ecclesiastes. "All things come 
alike to all : there is one event to the righteous and to the 
wicked ; to the good, and to the clean, and to the unclean ; 
to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not." In 
this, brethren, you will observe the querulous complaint of a 
man who has ceased to feel that God is the Ruler of this 
world. A blind chance, or a dark destiny, seems to rule all 
earthly things. And that is the penalty of leaving God's 
narrow path for sin's wider and more flowery one. You lose 
your way ; you get perplexed ; doubt takes possession of 
your soul. And, my Christian brethren, if I speak to any 
such, you know that there is no sufiering more severe than 
doubt. There is a loss of aim, and you know not what you 
have to live for. Life has lost its meaning and its infinite 
significance. There is a hollo wness at the heart of your ex- 
istence. There is a feeling of weakness, and a discontented 
loss of self-respect. God has hidden His face from you be- 
cause you have been trying to do without Him or to serve 
Him with a divided heart. 

But now, lastly, we have to remark, that the love of God 
brought Solomon through all this to spiritual manhood. 
"Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, 
and keep his commandments : for this is the whole duty of 
man." In this, brethren, we have the evidence of his victory. 
Doubt, and imprisonment, and Avorldliness have passed away, 
and clear activity, belief, freedom, have taken their place. It 
was a terrible discipline, but God had made that discipline 
successful. Solomon struggled manfully to the end. The 
details of his life were dark, but the life itself was earnest ; 
and after many a fall, repentance, with unconquerable pur- 
pose, began afresh. And so he struggled on, often baffled, 
often down, but never finally subdued ; and still with tears 
and indomitable trust, returning to the conflict again. And 
so when we come to the end of his last earthly work, Ave find 
the sour smoke, which had so long been smouldering in his 



744 Solomon s Restoration. 

heart and choking his existence, changed into bright, clear 
flame. He has found the secret out at last, and it has filled 
his whole soul with blessedness. God is man's happiness. 
" Fear God, and keep His commandments : for this is the 
whole duty of man." 

And now, brethren, let us come to the meaning and the 
personal application of all this. There is a way — let us not 
shrink from saying it — there is a way in which sin may be, 
made to minister to holiness. "To whomsoever much is 
forgiven the same loveth much." There was an everlasting 
truth in what our Messiah said to the moral Pharisees : 
"The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of 
God before you." Now these are Christ's words ; and we 
will not fear to boldly state the same truth, though it be 
liable to much misinterpretation. Past sin, brethren, may be 
made the stepping-stone to heaven. Let a man abuse that 
if he will by saying, " Then it is best to sin." A man may 
make the doctrine absurd, even shocking, by that inference, 
but it is true for all that. "All things work together for 
good to them that love God." All things, even sin. God 
can take even your sin, and make it work to your soul's 
sanctification. He can let you down into such an abyss of 
self-loathing and disgust, such life- weariness, and doubt, 
and misery, and disappointment, that if He ever raises you 
again by the invigorating experience of the love of Christ, 
you will rise stronger from your very fall, and in a manner 
secured against apostasy again. Solomon, king of Israel, 
sinned, and, by the strange power of the cross of Christ, 
that sin gave him deeper knowledge of himself, deeper 
insight into the mystery of human life, more marvellous 
power of touching the souls of his brother-men, than if he 
had not sinned. But forget not this, if ever a great sinner 
becomes a great saint, it will be through agonies which none 
but those who have sinned know. 

Brethren, I speak to those among you who know some- 
thing about what the world is worth, who have tasted its 
fruits, and found them like the Dead Sea apples — hollowness 
and ashes. By those foretastes of coming misery which 
God has already given you, those lonely feelings of utter 
wretchedness and disappointment when you have returned 
home palled and satiated from the gaudy entertainment, 
and the truth has pressed itself icy cold upon your heart, 
" Vanity of vanities" — is this worth living for? By all that, 
be warned. Be true to your convictions. Be honest with 
yourselves. Be manly in working out your doubts, as 
Solomon was. Greatness, goodness, blessedness, lie not in 



Joseph's Forgiveness of his Brethren, 745 

the life that you are leading now. They lie in quite a 
different path : they lie in a life hid with Christ in God. 
Before God is compelled to write that upon your heart in 
disgust and disappointment, learn " what is that good for 
the sons of men which they should do " all the days of 
their life under the heaven. Learn from the very greatness 
of your souls, which have a capacity for infinite agony, that 
you are in this world for a grander destiny than that of 
frittering away life in uselessness. 

Lastly, let us learn from this subject the covenant love 
of God. There is such a thing as love which rebellion 
can not weary, which ingratitude can not cool. It is the love 
of God to those whom He has redeemed in Christ. " Did 
not Solomon, king of Israel, sin ? and yet there was no 
king like him who was beloved of his God." Let that, my 
Christian brethren, be to us a truth not to teach carelessness, 
but thankfulness. Oh ! trembling believer in Christ, are 
you looking into the dark future and fearing, not knowing 
w^hat God will be to you at the last ? Remember, Christ 
" having loved His own who are in the world loved them to 
to the end." Your salvation is in the hands of Christ; the 
everlasting arms are beneath you. The rock on which your 
salvation is built is love, and the gates of hell shall not 
prevail against you. 



XVII. 
JOSEPH'S FORGIVENESS OF HIS BRETHREN. 

*' And when Joseph's brethren saw that then* father was dead, they said, 
Joseph will peradventure hate us, and will certainly requite us all the evil 
which we did unto him. And they sent a messenger unto Joseph, saying, 
Thy father did command before he died, saying. So shall ye say unto Joseph, 
Forgive, I pray thee now, the trespass of thy brethren, and their sin ; for 
they did unto thee evil: and now, we pray thee, forgive the trespass of the 
servants of the God of thy father. And Joseph wept when they spake unto 
him. And his brethren also went and fell down before his face ; and they 
said. Behold, we be thy servants. And Joseph said unto them, Fear not : 
for am I in the place of God ? But as for you, ye thought evil against me ; 
but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is thit; day, to save much 
people alive. Now, therefore, fear ye not : I will nourish you, and your little 
ones. And he comforted them, and spake kindly unto them." — Gen. 1. 15-21. 

Christianity is a revelation of the love of God — a de- 
mand of our love by God based thereon. Christianity is a 
revelation of Divine forgiveness — a requirement thereupon 
that we shnnlrl forixive each other. 



74^ JosepJi s Forgiveness of his Brethren, 

" A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one 
another; as I haA'e loA'ed you, that ye also love one another" 
(John xiii. 34) ; " Ye call me Master and Lord : and ye say 
well, for so I am. If I, then, your Lord and Master, have 
washed your feet ; ye also ought to wash one another's feet. 
For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have 
done to you" (John xiii. 13-15) ; "Forgive us our debts, as 
we forgive our debtors " (Matt. vi. 12) ; " Beloved, if God so 
loved us, we ought also to love one another" (1 Johniv. 11) ; 
" Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, even as 
God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you" (Ephes. iv. 32). 

Now these duties of love, forgiveness, service, are called 
" new commandment^." But we should greatly mistake if 
we suppose that they are new in this sense, that they were 
created by the Gospel, and did not exist before. The Gospel 
did not rtiake God love us ; it only revealed His love. The 
Gospel did not make it our duty to forgive and love ; it only 
revealed the eternal order of things, to transgress which is 
our misery. These belong to the eternal order and idea of 
our humanity. We are not planted by Christ in a new ar- 
bitrary state of human relationships, but redeemed into the 
state to which we were created. 

So St. John says, " I write no new commandment unto you, 
but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning. 
The old commandment is the word w^hich ye have heard from 
the beginning. Again, a new commandment I write unto 
you, which thing is true in him and in you ; because the dark- 
ness is past, and the true light now shineth " — old, because 
of the eternal order of love ; new, because shown in the light 
of the love of Christ. Christianity is the true life — the right 
humanity. 

Now the proof of this is, that ages before Christ appeared, 
they who gave themselves up to- God to be led instead of to 
their own hearts, did actually reduce to practice, and mani- 
fested in their lives, those very principles which, as princi- 
ples, were only revealed by Christ. 

Here, for instance, three thousand years before Christ, Jo- 
seph, a Hebrew slave, taught by life's vicissitudes, educated 
by God, acts out practical Christianity — one of its deepest 
and most difficult lessons. There is nothing in the New Tes- 
tament more childlike than this forgiveness of his brethren. 
Some perhaps may be shocked at dwelling on this thought : 
it seems to them to derogate from Christ. This is as if they 
thought that they honored Christ by believing that until He 
came no truth was known — that He created truth. These 
persons tremble at every instance of a noble or pure life 



Joseph's Forgiveness of his Brethren. 747 

which can be shown in persons not enlightened by Christian- 
ity. But, in truth, this is a corroboration of Christianity. 
Christianity is a full revelation of the truth of life, into which 
every one who had been here had, in his measure, struck his 
roots before. It is simply " the truth, the same yesterday, 
to-day and forever." And all instances of such a life only 
corroborate the truth of the revelation. 
"We divide our subject into two parts : 

I. The petition of the brethren. 
n. Joseph's forgiveness. 

1. The petition was suggested by their own anticipations 
of vengeance. Now whence came these anticipations ? I 
reply, from their own hearts. Under similar circumstances 
they would have acted so, and they took for granted that Jo- 
seph would. We suspect according to our nature, we look 
on others as we feeh Suspicion proves character, so does 
faith. AYe believe and suspect as we are. But unless there 
had been safety for them in Joseph's heart, a guaranty in the 
nobleness of Joseph's nature, their abject humiliation would 
have saved them nothing. Little they knew the power of 
hate, the sweetness of revenge, if they fancied that a grudge 
treasured up so many years would be foregone on the very 
verge of accomplishment for the sake of any satisfaction, 
prayer, apology. 

Now the error of Joseph's brethren is our error towards 
God. Like them, we impute to God our own vindictive feel- 
ings, and, like them, we pray a prayer which is in itself an in- 
sult or absurd. We think that sin is an injury, a personal 
affront, instead of a contradiction of our OAvn nature, a de- 
parture from the Divine harmony, a disfigurement of what 
is good. Consequently we expect that God resents it. Our 
vindictive feelings we impute to God : we would revenge, 
therefore we think He would. And then in this spirit, " For- 
give us," means, " Forego thy vengeance. Do not retaliate. 
I have injured Thee ; but lo ! I apologize, I lie in the dust. 
Bear no malice, indulge no rancor, O God !" This is the 
heathen prayer which we often offer up to God. And just 
as it must have been unavailing in Joseph's case except there 
were safety in Joseph's character, so must it be useless in 
ours unless in God's nature there be a guaranty which we 
think our prayers create. Think you that God, if revenge- 
ful, can be bought off by prayer, by rolling in the dust, by 
unmanly cries, by coaxing, or flattery ? God's forgiveness is 
the regeneration of our nature. God can not avert the con« 
sequences of our sin. 



74^ JosepJis Forgiveness of his Brethren, 

We must get rid of these heathen ideas of God. God's 
forgiveness is properly our regeneration. You can not by 
prayer buy off God's vindictiveness ; for God is not vin- 
dictiveness, but love. You can not by prayer avert the 
consequences of sin, for the consequences are boundless, 
inseparable from the act. Nor is there in time or eternity 
any thing that can sever the connection. If you think that 
you can sin, and then by cries avert the consequences of 
sin, you insult God's character. You can only redeem the 
past by alteration of the present. By faith in God's love, 
by communion with His Spirit, you may redeem yourself; 
but you can not win the love of God by entreaty unless that 
love be yours already —yours, that is, when you claim it. 

2. Next, observe the petition was caused by their father's 
insisting on their asking pardon. 

He recognized the duty of apology. For Jacob knew 
that Joseph bore no malice. Not to change Joseph, but to 
fulfill their obligations, he gave the charge that required sat- 
isfaction. We know how false conceptions are of satisfac- 
tion : in the language of the old duel, to give satisfaction 
meant to give one who had been injured by you an opportu- 
nity of taking your life. In the language of semi-heathen 
Christianity, to satisfy God means to give God an equivalent 
in blood for an insult offered. No wonder that with such 
conceptions the duty of apology is hard — almost impossible. 
We can not say, " I have erred," because it gives a triumph. 
Now the true view of satisfaction is this — to satisfy, not re- 
venge, but the law of right. The sacrifice of Christ satisfied 
God, because it exhibited that which alone can satisfy Him, 
the entire surrender of humanity. The satisfaction of an 
apology is doing the right — satisfying — doing all that can be 
done. 

It may be our lot to be in Jacob's circumstances : we may 
be arbiters in a dispute, or seconds in a quarrel. And remem- 
ber, to satisfy in this sense is not to get for your friend all 
his vindictiveness requires, or to make him give as little as 
the other demands, but to see that he does all that should of 
right be done. 

His honor ! Yes ; but you can not satisfy his honor by 
glutting his revenge, only by making him do right. And if 
he has erred or injured, in no possible way can you repair his 
honor or heal his shame except by demanding that he shall 
make full acknowledgment. " I have erred" it is very hard 
to say ; but because it is hard it is therefore manly. You are 
too proud to apologize, because it will give your adversary an 
advantage ? But remember, the advantage is already given 



Joseplis Forgiveness of his Brethren, 749 

to him by the wrong that you have done, and every hour 
that you delay acknowledgment you retain your inferiority ; 
you diminish the difference and your inferiority so soon as 
you dare to say, " I did wrong ; forgive me." 

3. Plea — as servant of the same God (ver. 17). Forgive- 
ness is not merely a moral but a religious duty. Now re- 
member this was an argument which was only available in 
behalf of the Jews. It could not have been pleaded for an 
Egyptian. Joseph might have been asked to forgive on 
grounds of humanity ; but not by the sanctions of religion, 
if an Egyptian had offended him. For an Egyptian did 
not serve the God of his fathers. 

How shall we apply that ? According to the spirit in 
which we do, we may petrify it into a maxim narrower than 
Judaism, or enlarge it into Christianity. If by " servants 
of the God of our fathers," we mean our own sect, party, 
church, and that we must forgive them^ narrow indeed is the 
principle we have learnt from this passage. But Judaism 
was to preserve truth — Christianity to expand it. Christian- 
ity says, just as Judaism did, "Forgive the servants of the 
God." Its pleas are, " Forgive : for he is thy fellow-servant. 
Seventy times seven times forgive thy brother^ But it ex- 
pands that word " brother " beyond what the law ever 
dreamed of — God is the Father of man. If there be a soul 
for which Christ did not die, then that man you are not, on 
Judaistic principles, bound to forgive. If there be one whom 
the love of God does not embrace in the Gospel family, then 
for that one this plea is unavailing. But if God be the 
Father of the race, and if Christ died for all ; if the word 
*' neighbor " means even an alien and a heretic ; then this 
plea, narrowed by the law to his nation, expands for us to all. 
Because the servant of our Maker and the child of our Father, 
therefore he must be forgiven, let him be whosoever he may. 

II. Let us consider, in the second place, Joseph's forgive- 
ness. 

1. Joseph's forgiveness was showm by his renunciation of 
the office of avenger — " Am I in the place of God ?" Now 
this we may make to convey a Christian or a heathen sense, 
as we read it. It might read — we often do read it — we often 
say it thus : " I will not avenge, because God will. If God 
did not, I would. But certain that He will do it, I can wait, 
and I will wait, long years ; I will watch the reverses of for- 
tune ; I will mark the progress of disease ; I will observe the 
error, failing, grief, loss ; and I will exult and say, ' I knew it, 
but my hand was not on him ; God has revenged me better 



750 josepJts Forgiveness of his Brethren, 

than I could myself.' " This is the cold-blooded, fearful feel 
ing that is sometimes concealed under Christian forgiveness. 
Do not try to escape the charge. That feeling your heart 
and mine have felt, when we thought we were forgiving, and 
were praised for it. That was not Joseph's meaning. Read 
it thus : " If God does not, dare I avenge ? ' Am I in the 
place of God ?' Dare I 

" ' Snatch from His hand the balance and the rod, 
Rejndge His justice, be the God of God ?' " 

So speaks St. Paul, " Vengeance is mine." Therefore wait, 
sit still, and see God's wrath ? No ! " Therefore, if thine en- 
emy hunger, feed him ; if he thirst, give him drink." This is 
the Christian revenge. 

I say not that there is no such thing as the duty of re- 
dressing wrongs, especially those of others. There is a keen 
sense of wrong, a mightj^ demand of the heart for justice, 
which can not be put aside. And he who can not feel indig- 
nation against wrong can not, in a manly way, forgive injury. 
But I say, the only revenge which is essentially Christian is 
that of retaliating by forgiveness. And he who has ever 
tasted that Godlike feeling of forbearance Avhen insulted ; 
of speaking well of one who has slandered him (pleasure all 
the more exquisite if the slanderer does not know it) ; of 
doing service in requital of an injury ; he, and only he, can 
know how it is possible for our frail humanity, by abnegating 
the place of God the Avenger, to occupy t'he place of God 
the Absolver. 

2. Joseph forgave, or facilitated forgiveness, by observing 
the good results of what had seemed so cruel (ver. 20). 
Good out of evil — that is the strange history of this world, 
whenever we learn God's character. No thanks to you. 
Your sin dishonored you, though it will honor God. By our 
intentions, and not by the results, are our actions judged. 
Remember this tenaciously : forgiveness becomes less diffi- 
cult, your worst enemy becomes your best friend, if you trans- 
mute his evil by good. No one can really permanently in- 
jure us but ourselves. No one can dishonor us : Joseph was 
immured in a dungeon. They spat on Christ. Did that sully 
the purity of the one, or lower the Divine dignity of the 
other? 

3. He forgot the injury. He spake kindly to them, com- 
forted them, and bade them fear not. An English proverb 
lias joined forgiving and forgetting. No forgiveness is com- 
plete which does not join forgetfulness. You forgive only so 
far as you forget. But here we must explain, else we get 



yosepJis Forgiveness of his Brethren, 751 

into the common habit of using words without meaning. 
To forget, literally, is not a matter of volition. You can by 
will remember — you can not by an act of will forget — you 
can not give yourself a bad memory if you have a good one. 
In that sense, to forget is a foolish way of talking. And 
indeed to forget in ihe sense of oblivion would not be truly 
forgiving ; for if we forgive only while we do not recollect, 
who shall insure that with recollection hate shall not return ? 

More than that. In the parable of the forgiving debtor, 
you remember his sin in this sense was not forgotten. Fresh 
sin waked up all the past. He was forgiven ; then he was 
reminded of the past debt, and cast into prison. Not for his 
new offense, but for his old debt, was he delivered to the 
tormentors — it was not forgotten. But the true Christian 
forgiveness, as here in Joseph's example, is unconditional. 
Observe — he did not hold his brethren in suspense; he did 
not put them on their good behavior ; he did not say, " I 
hold this threat over you if you do it again." That is for- 
giving and not forgetting. But that was a frank, full, fi'ee 
remission — consoling them — trying to make them forget — 
neither by look or word showing memory, unless the fault 
had been repeated. It was unconditional, with no reserve 
behind. That was forgiving and forgetting. 

To conclude. Forgiveness is the work of a long life to 
learn. This was at the close of Joseph's life. He would not 
have forgiven them in youth — not when the smart was fresh 
— ere he saw the good resulting from his suffering. But 
years, experience, trial, had softened Joseph's soul. A dun- 
geon and a government had taught him much ; also his fa- 
ther's recent death. Do not think that any formula will 
teach this. Xo mere maxims got by heart about forgiveness 
of injuries — no texts perpetually on the tongue will do this — 
God alone can teach it : By experience ; by a sense of human 
frailty ; by a perception of " the soul of goodness in things 
evil ;" by a cheerful trust in human nature ; by a strong sense 
of God's love ; by long and disciplined realization of the aton- 
ing love of Christ : only thus can we get that free, manly, 
large, princely spirit which the best and purest of all the pa* 
triarchs, Joseph, exhibited in his matured manhood. 



752 A Thanksgiving Day. 



xvni. 
A THANKSGIVING DAY. 

"Afterward Jesus findeth him in the temple, and said unto him, Behold, 
Siou art made whole : sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee. The 
man departed, and told the Jews that it was Jesus, which had made him 
whole." — John v. 14, 15. 

The man to whom these words were spoken had been 
lying, only a few days before, a helpless, hopeless sufferer 
among the porches of Bethesda, together with a number of 
others affected in a similar manner. By a singular, unex- 
pected, and miraculous event, he was rescued from his calam- 
ity, while the remainder were left to the mercies of public 
charity, or to avail themselves of the mysterious spring of 
Bethesda. 

It was a time of festival in Jerusalem, the streets were 
probably echoing with the voice of mirth and festivity, with 
the sounds of them that kept holiday : but it was to this con- 
gregation of the sick and the miserable that the Redeemer 
bent his steps ; it was what might have been expected from 
the Son of Man — "The whole need not a physician, but they 
lih.^t are sick." It was the office of the Man of Sorrows to 
soothe the wretched ; and of all the crowded scenes that day 
enacting in the Holy City, the " great multitude of impotent 
folk, of blind, halt, withered," found that their abode was the 
most congenial atmosphere to the soul of the Redeemer. 

And in all this we have but a miniature representation of 
the world as it is now. Jerusalem contained within its walls, 
within its proud battlements, and amidst its stately temples, 
as much wretchedness and as much misery, separated only 
by a thin partition from its abodes of luxury and state, as 
our own metropolis does now. It is a miniature representa- 
tion of the world in this, so full of outward show and of in- 
ward wretchedness. It is a representation of the world we 
live in, inasmuch as it is a place where selfishness prevails; 
for there was affixed a certain condition to the healing of the 
spring, that the man should be the first ; if he were not the 
first, no miracle took place, and there was one more friend- 
less wretch. 

This man had no one to give him the little assistance re- 
quired. For thirty-eight years he had been lingering here, 
and there appeared to have been no visitor who would suj> 



A Thanksgiving Day, 753 

ply what was wanting of the ties of blood or relationship. 
It is, I say, but a representation of what this world is, when 
the love of God has not touched the heart of man. It is a 
representation of the world, too, in this, that with suffering 
there is frequently appointed the remedy. The remedy is 
often found side by side with the pain it may relieve, if we 
could but make use of it. It is so in both bodily and spirit- 
ual maladies — there is a remedial system, a pool of Bethesda, 
everywhere springing up by the side of sin and suffering. 

It is a representation of the world, also, that the presence 
of the Son of Man should be felt rather in scenes of sorrow 
than of joy. It is not in the day of high health and strength, 
when our intellect is powerful, our memory vigorous, when 
we feel strong in our integrity and our courage, but when 
onr weakened powers have made us feel that we are "a 
worm and no man ;" when our failing faculties convince us 
that, except for our connection with immortality, our minds 
would be as nothing ; when we feel temptation getting too 
strong for us, and that we are on the brink of falling — then 
it is that we are taught there is a strength not our own, be- 
yond any thing that we possess of our own. It is then that 
the presence of the Son of Man is felt ; then is the day of our 
merciful and mysterious deliverance. 

And there is another resemblance to be noted. The Sa- 
viour of the world went into the Bethesda porches, and out 
of the great number of sufferers he selected one — not because 
of his superior righteousness, not for any merit on his part, 
but for reasons hidden within His own Almighty Mind. So 
it is in the world — one is taken, another is left ; one nation 
is sterile, another is fertile ; one is full of diseases from which 
another is exempted ; one man is surrounded with luxuries 
and comforts, another with every suffering which flesh is heir 
to. So much for the miniature of the world exhibited by 
the pool of Bethesda. 

Now in connection with this subject there are two branch- 
es in which we will arrange our observations. 

I. The cause of this man's disease. 
n. The history of his gratitude. 

I. Concerning the cause of his disease, we are not left in 
any doubt, the Redeemer's own lips have told us what it was 
— " Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee." So we 
see there was a strange connection between this bodily mal- 
ady and moral evil, a connection that would have startled all 
around if it had been seen. No doubt the men of science, 
versed in the healing art. would have found some cause foi 



754 ^ Thanksgiving Day. 

his malady connected with the constitution of his bodily 
frame ; but the Redeemer went beyond all this. Thirty- 
eight years before, there had been some sin committed, pos- 
sibly a small sin, in our eyes at least, of which the result had 
been thirty-eight years of suffering ; and so the truth we 
gather from this is, there is a connection between physical 
and moral evil ; a connection, my Christian brethren, more 
deep than any of us have been accustomed to believe in. 

But most assuredly, many of the most painful forms of dis- 
ease that come upon the body depend upon the nervous con- 
stitution ; and the nervous system is connected inseparably 
with the moral state more than men suppose. Often where 
we have been disposed to refer the whole to external causes, 
there has been something of moral disorder in the character 
which makes that constitution exquisitely susceptible of suf- 
fering and incapable of enjoyment. Every physician will 
tell us that indulged passions will lead to a disturbed state 
of body ; that want of self-control in various ways will end in 
that wretched state when the light that falls on the eye inflicts 
torture, the sounds that are heard in the ear are all discord, 
and all this beautiful creation, so formed for delight, only 
ministers to the sufferings of the diseased and disorganized 
frame. Thus we see that external suffering is often connect- 
ed with moral evil, but we must carefully guard and modify 
this statement, for this is not universally the case ; and it is 
clear this was the Saviour's opinion, for when the disciples 
came to Him on another occasion asking whether the blind 
man or his parents did sin. He answered that neither had 
sinned, plainly showing that there was sometimes physical 
suffering for which there was no moral cause. In that case 
it was not for his own sin, or even that of others — it bafiled 
all the investigations of man to explain it. 

Now, we must remember this when Ave see cases of bodily 
suffering : we must consider that there is a great difference 
between the two senses in which the word punishment is 
used. It may be a penalty, it may be a chastisement : one 
meaning of punishment is, that the law exacts a penalty if it 
is broken — notice having been given that a certain amount 
of suffering would follow a certain course of action. All 
the laws of God, in the physical world, in the moral world, 
or in the political world, if broken, commonly entail a penal- 
ty. Revolutions beset a nation, shaking its very founda- 
tions, owing to some defects in the justice or wisdom of its 
government, and we can not say that all this comes from the 
dust, or springs out of the ground. There are causes in the 
history of past events that will account for it. The philo* 



A Thanksgiving Day. 755 

sophical historian of future years Avill show the results of 
some political mistake, coutiimed perhaps for centuries, by 
the rulers of this nation. So in the moral and in the physi- 
cal world there are laws, as it were, that execute themselves. 
If a man eat a deleterious herb, whether he does it willing- 
ly or unconsciously, the penalty will fall on his body. If a 
man touch the lightning-conductor, not knowing that the air 
is charged with electricity, no holiness on his part will pre 
vent the deadly stroke. But there is another kind of law 
written in the hearts of men, and given to the conscience, 
when the penalty is awarded as the result of moral trans 
gression, and then it becomes a cbastisement, and the Ian 
guage of Scripture then becomes the language of our hearts 
It is the rod of God that hath done all this. 

There is another thing that we must bear in mind, that 
there are certain evils which fall upon man over which he 
can have no control. They come as the result of circum- 
stances over which he has no power whatever. So, we read 
in the Second book of Kings, the child of the Shunammite 
went out amongst the reapers ; he was suddenly seized with 
a deadly pain in his head, was taken to his mother, sate upon 
her lap, and died at noon. A sunstroke had struck that 
child ; but to say that from any fault of his he was selected 
as the object of suffering, when the rest of the reapers were 
spared, would be as unjust as to say that those upon whom 
the Tower of Siloam fell were sinners above all the Gali- 
leans. 

Moreover, to understand this we must recollect that the 
laws of God and the penalties of God are not miracles. If 
the penalty comes as the consequence appointed by God 
Himself, to follow certain sins, it is a natural punishment, but 
if it comes with no connection, it is then an arbitrary punish- 
ment. So, if a man educates a child ill, and he turns out a 
bad man, there is the natural connection between the penalty 
and the guilt. But if a man, pursuing his journey, is struck 
with lightning, there is no penalty there. Now, in the Old 
Testament we find a natural punishment falling on Eli. He 
allowed his children to grow up without correction, and the 
contempt and scorn of the whole nation fell upon that family, 
and the father actually died in consequence of the shock of 
his children's misconduct. But if the father had died in bat- 
tle, or by an accident, then it would have been unjust to say 
that there was any connection between his misconduct and his 
sudden death ; it would have been an arbitrary connection. 

The punishments of God are generally not arbitrary : each 
law, as it were, inflicts its own penalty. It does not execute 



75^ A Thanksgiving Day. 

one that belongs to another. So, if the drunkard lead a life 
of intoxication, the consequence will be a trembling hand 
and a nervous frame ; but if he be drowned in the seas when 
sailing in the storm, he is punished for having broken a natu- 
ral law, not a moral law of God. Let us then bear in mind 
that if the ship convey across the ocean the heavenly-mind- 
ed missionary and the scoffing infidel, if the working of the 
vessel be attended to, and there is nothing unusual in the 
winds and the waves, they will convey the one to his desti- 
nation as safely as the other. 

Now, the application we must make of all this is, if a man 
perish when out on a sabbath-day, we have no right to say 
that he dies because he has broken the sabbath. If famine 
or pestilence visit the land, it may be explained by the in- 
fringement of some of God's natural laws; the earth may 
not be rightly cultivated, sanitary means have not been 
taken to stop the pestilence ; but we have no right to say 
that they come in consequence of political relations which 
are not to our mind, or of regulations of policy of which we 
disapprove. 

There is one thing more. It is perfectly possible that 
transgressions against the natural laws of God may, in the 
end, become trespasses against His moral law, and then the 
penalty becomes chastisement. The first man that drank the 
fermented juice of the grape was perfectly innocent, even if 
it caused intoxication ; but when he found how it affected 
his brain, it became sin to him thenceforward. The first 
time that a man enters into society which he finds hurtful 
to his religious feelings, he may have done it innocently ; 
but when he sees how it lowers the tone of his character, he 
must mingle amongst them no more. So want of cleanli- 
ness in some Alpine regions may result from ignorance of 
the laws of nature; but when, in more crowded populations, 
it is ascertained that it is productive of disease, and injurious 
to those around them, then the infraction of the natural law 
is stigmatized as a higher degree of turpitude. That which 
was a penalty becomes something more of chastisement from 
the wrath of God. So it is that science goes on enlighten- 
ing men more and more as to the laws of God's physical 
world, and telling them what they must and what they must 
not do, in order to lessen the amount of bodily suffering 
around us. 

My Christian brethren, we have spoken of these things at 
some length, because all these considerations have been 
brought into our view by that pestilence,* f*-om which wo 
♦ The cholera. 



A Thanksgiving Day, 757 

celebrate our deliverance this day; partly the result of 
causes over which man has no control, and partly the result 
of the disregard of natural laws ; partly, also, from the pres- 
ence of moral evil amongst us. That these three distinct 
classes of causes have been present may be proved by trac- 
ing its history. They who have made it their duty to trace 
out its progress tell us that its origin was in 1818, in Bengal, 
when it arose during the overflow of the River Ganges ; and 
then, dividing into two streams of pestilence and death, it 
passed through the world ; one going to the east, the other 
to the west. The eastern current passed on till it reached 
the shores of China ; the western moved slowly on with gi- 
gantic tread, decimating nations as it went, cutting off nine 
thousand of the British army ; and passing through Persia 
and Arabia, it destroyed twelve thousand of the pilgrims to 
Mecca, till it paused mysteriously and strangely on the very 
verge of Europe — as if the voice of God himself had said, 
*' There is danger near ; set thine house in order." By 1830 
it had reached the metropolis of Russia. In 1831 it was 
doing its dreadful work in our own capital, while eighteen 
thousand fell in Paris alone ; and it then passed on, as a 
winged messenger, across the ocean to America. 

There was then a strange disappearance of the pestilence 
for four or five years, till 1837, when it appeared first in the 
southern parts of Europe, and gradually rolled its relentless 
course onward to our shores. In all this you will perceive 
something over which we have no control. It has pursued 
its way not guided by moral evil or by physical causes, but 
by some cause, explain it as you will — as electricity, or any 
other conjecture — it is one that baflfles every effort to stay 
its progress. It has taken the same road, too, that it took 
on its former visitation. The common food of man seems 
changed into something poisonous, the very air is charged 
with contagion ; every thing proclaims it as a visitation from 
the Almighty. And in the very character of the disease 
there is something that marks it out from all other diseases: 
it has been truly said, that in its worst cases there is but one 
symptom, and that one is death. A man is full of health 
and strength, and in two hours he is gone. It is a disease 
which in its best form is terrific. That being who just now 
stood before you in perfect health, is in a moment a cold, 
livid, convulsed mass of humanity, fighting with the foe 
that threatens to overcome him. 

But yet we find, in spite of all this, that in the progress of 
this strange disease, great mistakes have been made by man. 
From the circumstance of the poorer classes being the chief 



758 A Thanksgiving Day. 

sufferers, they fancied that it was inflicted by the higher^ 
and in some places they rose against them, accusing them of 
poisoning the wells. And we find Christians so mistaken as 
to look on all this suffering, not as the natural connection 
between sin and its penalty, but as having some arbitrary 
connection with the sin of others, from which they them- 
selves and their own party are free. 

But, in the next place, we find that it really has been 
caused in some degree by the transgression of the laws of 
nature ; for whatever may have been the secret origin of the 
disease, whatever may be the mystery of its onward course, 
still we know that there are certain conditions usually neces 
sary to make it destructive. So we find that in India it was 
the natives who for the most part suftered, those whose con- 
stitutions had less stamina than our own. And here we see 
that debility produced by over-work, bad air, crowded dwell- 
ings, have been the predisposing causes ; and this tells us, 
if ever visitation could speak, that aflliction cometh not out 
of the dust, neither does sorrow spring from the ground. It 
has no direct connection with moral character, except on pe- 
culiar points. Place a worldly man and a holy man in tlie 
same unfavorable circumstances for receiving the disorder, 
and you will not find the one has any charm to escape the 
fate of the other. 

But we do find that this disease is increased and propa- 
gated by human selfishness. We read of the crowds at 
Bethesda, of whom it was said, there was no man to put 
them into the water ; and so it is now. The poor, the helpless, 
the neglected, have been the chief sufferers. Out of two hun- 
dred and forty-three who in this place have suffered from that 
and similar causes, one hundred and sixty-three were re- 
ceiving parish relief And in this there is something that 
tells us not merely of ignorance, but of selfishness ; for when 
commissioners went through the length and breadth of the 
country to examine into the statistics of the disease, we were 
met by the startling fact that medical science, that careful 
nursing, could do nothing while our crowded graveyards, our 
teeming and airless habitations, our worn-out and unhealthy 
population, received and propagated the miasma ; and every 
time that a man in the higher classes perished, it was as if 
the poor neglected man had spoken from the grave ; or, as 
if God himself had been heard to speak through him. He 
seems to say, "I can prove to you now my relationship. 
You can receive evil from me, if nothing else has ever passed 
between us ; the same constitution, the same flesh and blood, 
the same frame were ouce ours \ and if I can do it in no otb- 



A Thanksgiving Day. 759 

81 way, I can prove, by infecting you, that I am your broth 
er still." 

Once more : it has been produced in a degree by moral 
evil ; vice has been as often the predisposing cause as any 
other external circumstance, in certain cases. I say in cer«. 
tain cases, not in all. A man might have been a blasphem- 
er, or a slanderei-, but neither of these sins would affect 
him ; but those sins which are connected with the flesh, sen* 
suality, drunkenness, gradually pervade the human frame, 
and fit it for the reception of this disease. 

II. But we will pass on to consider the history of this 
man's recovery, and of his gratitude. The first cause for 
gratitude was his selection. He alone was taken, and others 
were left. He had cause for gratitude, also, in that he had 
been taught the connection between moral evil and its pen- 
alty. He had been taught the certainty of God's laws, how 
they execute themselves, and, more blessed than all, he had 
been taught that there was a Personal Superintendence over 
all the children of men. The relief had come from the per- 
sonal interposition of the Son of Man. He went and told the 
Jews that it was Jesus who had done this. And this ex- 
plains to us the meaning and the necessity of a public ac- 
knowledgment of our gratitude. It is meant to show this 
nation that it is not by chance, nor by the operation of 
science, nor by the might of man, that we have been rescued, 
but that our deliverance comes direct from God. 

Let us observe the popular account (for John gives us the 
popular account) of the angel troubling the water. It mat- 
ters not whether it is scientifically to be proved or not, the 
secret causes lie hid beyond our investigation ; but this you 
can observe, that it was a religious act, that it was not done 
by chance, that there were living agents in the healing pro- 
cess. The man of science in the present day would tell you 
what were the ingredients in the spring — how it told on the 
cellular tissue, or on the nervous fabric ; but whatever he 
may make of it scientifically, it is true morally and relig- 
iously ; for what is every remedy but the angel, the messen- 
ger of God sent down from the Father of all mercy, the 
Fountain of all goodness ? So when we celebrate a day of 
national thanksgiving, it is but the nation's voice, arising in 
acknowledgment of a Parent's protection — that these things 
come not by chance, but that there is personal superintend- 
ence over this world, and this deliverance is the proof of a 
Father's love. . 

Once more : a day of thanksgiving is meant to be a warir 



760 A Thanksgiving Day. 

ing and a reminder against future sins. " Sin no more, lest 
a worse thing come unto thee." And it has ever been so, 
that the result of panic has been reaction. After excitement 
comes apathy ; after terror has been produced, by danger 
especially, comes indiiference, and therefore comes the warn- 
ing voice from the Redeemer — "Sin no more, lest a worse 
thing come unto thee." 

But we may perhaps say, "J!fy sin did not produce this 
disease. It was no doing — no fault of mine ; it came from 
causes beyond my control. The pestilence now has wreaked 
its vengeance ; I find I had nothing to do with it, and I may 
dismiss the subject from my mind." My brethren, let us 
look into this a little more deeply. It was not directly your 
sin that nailed your Redeemer to the cross, but the sin of 
the cruel Pharisees, of the relentless multitude ; yet it is 
said, "The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." It 
arises all from this circumstance, brethren — there are two 
worlds, a world of evil and a world of good. The Son of 
Man came as the perfect and entire representation of the 
kingdom of holiness. He came in collision with the world 
of evil ; He died for sinners — for the sins of others — of all 
who partake of the nature of moral evil : and therefore by 
their sin they nailed the Redeemer to the cross. All those 
who opposed themselves to Jesus would have opposed them- 
selves to Moses, Zacharias, and Abel ; they allowed the deeds 
of their fathers, and were partakers of the blood of all the 
prophets that had been slaiii upon the earth. 

The men who join in a crowd, aiding and abetting the 
death of any individual, by the law of every country are 
held guilty; and now, though there may have been no dis- 
tinct act of selfishness by which any man has perished at 
your hands ; though there have been no distinct want of 
care for the poor — still I may fearlessly ask you all, Christian 
brethren, does not your conscience tell you how little the 
welfare and the comfort of others has been in your thoughts ? 
As far as we have taken a part in the world's selfishness ; as far 
as we have lived for self and not for our neighbors ; as far 
as we have forgotten the poor sufferers lying in the porches 
of Bethesda — not directly, but indirectly, all that has fallen 
upon this land may have been sent as a chastisement to us. 

And there is this to be explained — " Sin no more ;" mean- 
ing apparently, that if a man did not sin, nothing more 
would happen. Are we to understand, then, that if a man 
has been blameless he will never suffer from sorrow or sick- 
ness ? or that if a man will avoid sin, he will never be visit- 
ed by death ? To have said that would have been to contra 



Christian Friendship, 761 

diet the history of the Redeemer's own life and death. He 
died, though He sinned not. How then, brethren, can we 
understand it ? Why, we can understand it but in this way, 
by recalling to our memory what has been already said of 
the difference between the punishment and the penalty. If 
a man live a humble and holy life in Christ Jesus, there is no 
promise that if plague visits his land it shall not come nigb 
him. Live in purity, live in unselfishness; there is no 
promise that you shall not be cut down in a day ; there is 
nothing in religion that can shield you from what the world 
calls trouble — from penalty ; but there is this — that which 
would have been chastisement is changed into penalty. 

The Redeemer suffered death as a penalty ; but by no 
means as chastisement ; on the contrary, it was the richest 
blessing which a Father's love could bestow upon His well- 
beloved Son, in whom He was well pleased. So it will be 
with every one of us. He who lives to God, rests in his Re- 
deemer's love, and is trying to get rid of his old nature — to 
him every sorrow, every bereavement, every pain, will come 
charged Avith blessings, and death itself will be no longer the 
king of terrors, but the messenger of grace, the very angel 
of God descending on the troubled waters, and calling him 
to his Father's home. 



XIX. 

christia:n^ friendshh^. 



"Then they ftiat feared the Lord spake often one to another: and the 
Lord hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before 
him for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name."— 
Mai. iii. 16. 

The first division of our subject is suggested by the word 
" then:^ When ? They did thus in the times of Malachi. 
It is only in reference to those times that we can extract the 
true lesson from the conduct of the holy men whose behav- 
ior he praises. We will consider — 

L The times of Malachi. 
II. The patience of the saints in evil times. 

I. Not much is known of the Prophet Malachi, or his exact 
date. We are sure, however, that he was the last prophet 
of the old dispensation. He lived somewhere between the 
restoration from captivity and the coming of Christ. 



762 Christian Frie7tdskip, 

Thus much we know of those times from history : The 
Jews were restored. From chap, iii.,ver. 10, we learn that the 
Temple had been rebuilt. But Israel's grandeur was gone, 
although still enjoying outward prosperity. The nation had 
sunk into a state of political degradation, and had become 
successively subject to the Persians, Syrians, Romans. It is 
precisely that political state in which national virtues do not 
thrive, and national decay is sure. * * * * 

Italy — Spain. 

They had a glorious past. They had the enlightenment of 
a present high civilization. But with this there was a want 
of unity, manhood, and simple virtues. There was just suf- 
ficient gallingness in the yoke to produce faction and sullen- 
ness ; but not enough curtailment of all physical comforts 
to rouse the nation as one man to reconquer freedom. It 
was a state in which there was no visible Divine interfer- 
ence. 

Compare this period of Israel's history with all which had 
preceded it. These four hundred years belong to profane 
history. The writings of that period are not reckoned in- 
spired, so widely do they differ from the Scripture tone. 
There were no prophets, no flood of light, " no open vision." 
The Word of God was precious as in that time between the 
death of Joshua and the calling of Samuel.* Except this soli 
tary voice, prophecy had hushed her harp. 

JSTow, what was given to Israel in that period ? 

I reply, retrospect, pause, and prospect. 

Retrospect^ in the sublime past which God had given her 
for her experience. " They have Moses and the prophets, let 
them hear them." On them they were to live — their nation's 
sacred history ; God's guidance and faithfulness ; the sure 
truth that obedience was best. 

Prospect^ in the expectation of better times. 

Dim, vague hints of the Old Testament had pointed them 
to a coming revelation — a day in which God should be near- 
er to them, in which society should be more pure. An ad- 
vent, in short. 

And between these two there was a pause. 

They were left by God to use the grace and knowledge al- 
ready given by Him. 

Now this is parallel to God's usual modes of dealing. Foi- 
example, the pause of four hundred years in the land of 
Egypt, between the bright days when Abraham talked with 
God, and the deliverance by Moses. 

The pause in Canaan when the Israelitish commonwealth 
* Four hundred and thirty-one years. 



Christian Friendship, 763 

was left, like a building, to settle down before being built 
higher, between the times of Joshua and of Samuel. 

The pause in the captivity, and now again a pause. 

A pause after each revelation until the next. 

So, in the natural world. Just as in summer there is a 
gush of nature's forces and a shooting forth; and then the 
long autumn and winter, in which is no growth, but an op- 
portunity, taught by past experience, for the husbandman to 
manure his ground, and sow his seed, and to wait for a new 
outpouring of life upon the world. 

And just as in human life, between its marked lessons 
there is a pause, in which we live upon past experience — • 
looking back and looking on. Experience and hope, that is 
human life : as in youth, expecting manhood, and then look- 
ing for future changes in our condition, character, so in all 
God's revelation system there have been periods of " open 
vision," and periods of pause — waiting ; when men are left 
to experience and hope. 

It is in vain that we have studied God's Word if we do 
not perceive that our own day and circumstances are parallel 
with those of the prophet MalachL We live in the world's 
fourth great pause. 

Miracles have ceased. Prophecy is silent. The Son of 
God is ascended. Apostles are no longer here to apply in- 
fallible judgment to each new circumstance as it arises, as 
St. Paul did to the state of the Corinthian Church. 

But we are left to the great Gospel principles which have 
been already given, and which are to be our food till the 
next flood of God's Spirit, the next revelation — that which 
the Scripture calls " the second advent." 

And the parallel holds in another respect. The Jews had 
but undefined hints of that which was to be. Yet they knew 
the general outlines and character of the coming time ; they 
knew that it would be a searching time, it was to be the 
"Refiner's" day; they knew that He should turn the hearts 
of the fathers to the children : and they knew that the mes- 
senger age must be preceded by a falling back on simpler 
life, and a return to first principles, as Malachi had predicted, 
and as John the Baptist called them to. They knew that it 
was an age in wiiich the true sacrifice would be offered. 

And so now — we know not yet what shall be; "but we 
know that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for 
^Q shall see Him as he is." "And every man that hath this 
fiope in l^va\ purijietli himself" 

We know that it will be the union of the human race— 
they will be '^onefoW 



764 Christian Friendship. 

This is the outline and character of the revelation; and 
we may work, at least, towards it. " Ye are not in darkness, 
that that day should overtake you as a thief. Ye are all the 
children of the light, and the children of the day." "Where- 
fore comfort yourselves together, and edify one another, even 
as also ye do." To strive after personal purity and attempt 
at producing unity, that is our work. 

We rest on that we have, and hope for that we see not. 
And only for the glimpse that hope gives us of that, is life 
worth having. 

II. Let us consider the conduct of different classes in these 
evil times. 

1. Some lived recklessly. 

Foremost among these were the priests, as has been al- 
ways found in evil times. The riot of a priest is worse than 
that of the laity. Mutual corruption. Against the priests 
Malachi's denunciations are chiefly directed. 

He speaks of the profanation of the sacred places (chap. 
i. 6, 7). Of sacrifice degraded (ver. 12, 13). Vice honored 
(chap. ii. ] 7). In that they called good evil and evil good. 
By these men belief in God was considered ridiculous. 

And then it was that one of those glorious promises was 
made, to be fulfilled in after-times. Malachi foresaw that 
the Gentiles would take up the neglected service (chap. i. 10, 
11), and the vision of a universal kingdom of God became 
the comfort of the faithful few. 

2. Others lived uselessly, because despondingly. 

The languor and despair of their hearts is read in the 
words (chap. iii. 14, 15); and indeed it is not surprising: to 
what point could good men look with satisfaction ? The na- 
tion was enslaved, and worse — they had become slaves in 
spirit. Their ancient purity was gone. The very priests 
had become atheists. Where was the promise of His coming ? 
Such, too, is the question of these latter times. And our re- 
ply is from past experience. 

That dark day passed, and a glorious revelation dawned 
on the world. From what has been, we justly infer what 
will be. Promises fulfilled are a ground of hope for those 
yet unfulfilled. Where is the promise now of holier times ? 
Yes, but remember the question seemed to be just as unan- 
answerable then ; it was just as unanswerable in the days of 
the Judges, and in the captivity in Egypt and in Babylon. 

This " Scripture was written for our admonition, on whom 
the ends of the world are come." Then the consolation of 
St. Peter becomes intelligible, " We have a more sure word 



Christian Friendship, 765 

of prophecy ; whereiinto ye do well that ye take heed, as 
unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, 
and the day-star arise in your hearts." 

3. But in these evil times there were a few who com- 
pared with one another their hopes, and sought strength in 
Christian communion and fellowship. Of them the text 
speaks. 

This communion of saints is twofold : it includes church 
fellowship and personal friendships. 

It is plain that from church fellowship they could gain lit- 
tle in those days. Unity there was not, but only disunion. 
Over that state Malachi lamented in that touching appeal — 
" Have we not all one Father ? hath not one God created us ? 
why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, 
by profaning the covenant of our fathers ?" Israel had for- 
gotten that she was a family. 

And it is true that in our day church fellowship is almost 
only a name. The Christianity of the nation does not bind 
us as individuals. Well — does the Church? Are there many 
traces of a common feeling? When church privileges are 
insisted on to produce unity, do they not produce division ? 
Are not these words of the prophet true of us ? Where are 
the traces of Christian brotherhood ? 

Here — in this town ? here — in this congregation ? at the 
holy supper which we join in to-day? Shall we meet to get 
private good, or to feel we are partakers of the same Body 
and the same Blood ? Therefore to insist on church union 
as the remedy would be to miss the special meaning of this 
verse. The malady of our disunion has gone too deep to be 
cured by you or me. 

We will consider it, therefore, in reference to Christian 
friendship. We find that within the outward Jewish Church 
there was an inner circle, knit together by closer bonds than 
circumcision or the passover — by a union of religious sym- 
pathies. " Then they that feared the Lord spoke often one 
to another:" they "thought upon His name." 

Let us consider the blessing of Christian friendship. Ie 
euch times it discharges a double office. 

1. For the interchange of Christian hope and Christian 
feeling. It is dreary to serve God alone ; it is desolate to 
have no one in our own circle or family from whom we can 
receive sympathy in our hopes. Hopes die. 

2. It is a mighty instrument in guarding against tempta 
tion. It is a safeguard, in the way of example, and also as a 
standard of opinion. We should become tainted by the 
world if it were not for Christian friends. 



766 Reconciliation by Christ. 

In conclusion, cultivate familiar intimacy only with those 
who love good and God. 

Doubtless there are circumstances which determine inti- 
macies, such as rank, station, similarity of tastes. But one 
thing must be paramount to and modify them all — com- 
munion in God. Not in a sectarian spirit. We are not to 
form ourselves into a party with those who think as we do, 
and use the formulas that we do. But the spirit of the text 
requires us to feel strongly that there is a mighty gulf be- 
tween those who love and those who do not love God. To 
the one class we owe civility, courtesy, kindness, even tender- 
ness. It is only those who love the Lord who should find in 
our hearts a home. 



XX. 
RECONCILIATION BY CHRIST. 

•' And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by 
wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled." — Col. i. 21. 

There are two, and only two kinds of goodness possible : 
the one is the goodness of those who have never erred ; the 
other is the goodness of those who, having erred, have been 
recovered from their error. The first is the goodness of those 
who have never offended ; the second is the goodness of those 
who, having offended, have been reconcil'^d. In the infinite 
possibilities of God's universe, it may be that there are some 
who have attained the first of these kinds of righteousness. 
It may be that amongst the heavenly hierarchies there are 
those who have kept their first estate, whose performances 
have been commensurate with their aspirations, who have 
never known the wretchedness, and misery, and degradation 
of a Fall. But whether it be so or not is a matter of no 
practical importance to us. It may be a question specula- 
tively interesting, but it is practically useless, for it is plain 
that such righteousness never can be ours. The only religiou 
possible to man is the religion of penitence. The righteous- 
ness of man can not be the integrity of the virgin citadel 
which has never admitted the enemy ; it can never be more 
than the integrity of the city which has been surprised and 
roused, and which, having expelled the invader with blood 
in the streets, has suffered great inward loss. 

Appointed to these two kinds of rigliteousuess there are 



Reconciliation by Christ. 767 

two kinds of happiness. To the first is attached the blessing 
of entire ignorance of the stain, pollution, and misery of guilt 
— a blessed happiness : but it may be that it is not the great- 
est. To the happiness resulting from the other is added a 
greater strength of emotion ; it may not have the calmness 
and peace of the first, but, perhaps, in point of intensity and 
fullness it is superior. It may be that the highest happiness 
can only be purchased through sufiering : and the language 
of the Bible almost seems to authorize us to say, that the 
happiness of penitence is deeper and more blessed than the 
happiness of the righteousness that has never fallen could 
be. 

There are two kinds of friendship — that which has never 
had a shock, and that which, after having been doubted, is 
at last made sure. The. happiness of this last is perhaps the 
greater. Such seems to be the truth implied in the parable 
of the prodigal son : in the robe, and the ring, and the fatted 
calf, and the music, and dancing, and the rapture of a father's 
embrace : and once more, in those words of our Redeemer, 
" There is more joy among the angels of heaven over one 
sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons 
that need no repentance." All these seem to tell of the im- 
measurable blessedness of penitence. And this, then, is our 
subject — the subject of reconciliation. 

But the text divides itself into two branches: 

I. Estrangement. 
II. Reconciliation. 

Estrangement is thus described : " You that were some- 
time " (that is, once) " alienated and enemies in your mind 
by wicked works :" in which there are three things. The 
first is the cause of the estrangement — wicked works ; the 
second is the twofold order ; and thirdly, the degree of that 
estrangement; first of all, mere alienation, afterwards hostili- 
ty, enmity. 

And, first of all, we consider the cause of the estrange- 
ment — "wicked works." Wicked works are voluntary 
deeds ; they are not involuntary, but voluntary wrong. 
There is a vague way in which we sometimes speak of sin, 
in which it is possible for us to lose the idea of its guilt, and 
also to lose the idea of personal responsibility. We speak of 
sin sometimes as if it were a foreign disease introduced into 
the constitution : an imputed gtiilt arising from an action 
not our own, but of our ancestors. It is never so that the 
Bible speaks of sin. It speaks of it as wicked works, volun- 
tary deeds, voluntary acts \ that you, a responsible individ- 



768 Reconciliation by Christ 

ual, have done acts which are wrong, of the mind, the hand, 
the tongue. The infant is by no means God's enemy; he 
may become God's enemy, but it can only be by voluntary 
action after conscience has been aroused. This our Master's 
words teach, when He tells us, " Suffer little children to 
come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." And 
such again is the mystery of Christian baptism. It tells us 
that che infant is not the child of the devil, but the child of 
God, the member of Christ, the heir of immortality. Sin, 
then, is a voluntary action. If you close your ear to the 
voice of God, if there be transgression of an inward law, if 
you sacrifice the heart and intellect to the senses, if you let ease 
or comfort be more dear to you than mward purity, if you 
leave duties undone, and give the body rule over the spirit — 
then you sin ; for these arc voluntary acts, these are wicked 
works. 

The result of this is twofold. The first step is simply the 
step of alienation. There is a difference between alienation 
and hostility : in alienation we feel that God is our enemy , 
in hostility we look on ourselves as enemies to God. Alien- 
ation — ^' you that were sometime alienated" — was a more 
forcible expression in the apostle's time than it can be to us 
now. In our modern political society, the alien is almost on 
a level with the citizen. The difference now is almost noth- 
ing ; in those days it was very great. The alien from the 
Jewish commonwealth had no right to worship with the 
Jews, and he had no power to share in the religious advan- 
tages of the Jews. The strength of the feeling that was ex- 
isting against the alien you will perceive in that proverbial 
expression quoted by the Redeemer, " It is not meet to take 
the children's bread, and cast it to the dogs^ In the Roman 
commonwealth, the word had a meaning almost stronger 
than this. To be an alien from the Roman commonwealth 
was to be separated from the authority and protection of 
the Roman law, and to be subjected to a more severe and 
degrading kind of penalty than that to which the Roman 
citizen was subject. The lash that might scourge the back 
of the alien offender might not fall on the back of a Roman 
citizen ; and this it was that caused the magistrates of Phil- 
ippi to tremble before their prisoners when the Apostle 
Paul said, " They have beaten us openly, uncondemned, be- 
ing Romans." The lash was the alien's portion. 

On reference to the second chapter of the Ephesians we 
find a conception given of alienation in the twelfth verse, 
where the apostle, speaking of the Ephesian converts, says, 
"That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens 



Reconciliation by Christ, 769 

rom the commonwealth of Israel^ and strangers from the 
covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in 
the world." This, brethren, is alienation, exclusion — to 
have no place in this world, to be without lot or portion in 
the universe, to feel God as your enemy, to be estranged 
from Him, and banished from His presence : for the law of 
God acts as its own executioner within our bosoms, and 
there is no defying its sentence ; from it there can be no ap- 
peal. 

My Christian brethren, hell is not merely a thing here- 
after, hell is a thing here ; hell is not a thing banished to 
the far distance, it is ubiquitous as conscience. Wherever 
there is a worm of undying remorse, the sense of having 
done wrong, and a feeling of degradation, there is hell be- 
gun. And now respecting this. These words, " banishment 
from God," " alienation," though merely popular phrases, 
are expressions of a deep truth — it is true they are hut pc-^- 
ular expressions, for God is not wrath. You are not ab« 
solutely banished from God's presence. The Immutable 
changes not. He does not become angry or passionate 
whenever one of the eight hundred million inhabitants of 
this world commits a sin. And yet you will observe there 
is no other way in which we can express the truth but in 
these popular words. Take the illustration furnished to us 
last Sunday : it may be that it is the cloud and the mist that 
obscure the sun from us ; the sun is not changed in conse- 
quence : it is a change in our atmosphere. But if thfe phi 
losopher says to you, the sun in its splendor remains the 
same in the infinite space above, it is only an optical delu- 
sion which makes it appear lurid : to what purpose is that 
difierence to you ? to you it is lurid, to you it is dark. If 
you feel a darkness in your eye, coldness in your flesh, to 
what purpose, so far as feeling is concerned, is it that philos- 
ophy tells you the sun remains unchanged ? And if it be that 
God in the heaven above remains love still, and that love 
warms not your heart ; and that God is Light, in whom is 
no darkness at all, yet He shines not in your heart ; my 
Christian brethren, let metaphysics and philosophy say what 
they will, these popular expressions are the true ones, after 
all ; to you God is angry, from God you are banished, God'& 
countenance is alienated from you. 

The second step of this estrangement reaches a higher de- 
gree still ; it is not merely that God is angry, but that we 
have become enemies to God. The illustration of the pro- 
cess of this we have seen in our common everyday life. 

It is sometimes the case that strength of attachment set- 
2b 



770 Reconciliatio7i by Christ. 

ties down to mere indifference, even changes to hatred. The 
first quarrel between friends is a thing greatly to be dread- 
ed ; it is often followed by the cessation of all correspond- 
ence, the interruption of that intercourse which has gone on 
so long. Well, a secret sense of self-blame and of wrong 
will intrude, and the only way in which we can escape it is 
by throwing the blame elsewhere. You see by degrees a 
cankered spot begins, and you look at it and touch it, and 
irritate it until the mortification becomes entire, and that 
which was at first alienation settles down into absolute ani- 
mosity. 

And such is it in the history of the alienation of the soul 
from God. The first step is to become indifferent, com- 
munion is interrupted, irregularity is begun, sin by degrees 
widens the breach, and then between the soul and God there 
is a great gulf fixed. Observe by what different ways dif- 
ferent classes of character arrive at that. Weak characters 
have one way, and strong and bold characters have another. 
The weak mind throws the blame on circumstances ; unable 
itself to subdue its own passions, it imagines there is some law 
In the universe that so ordains it ; insists that the blame is on 
circumstances and destiny, and says, "If I am thus it is not 
my fault ; if I am not to gratify my passions, why were they 
given to me ? ' Why doth He find fault, for who hath re- 
sisted His will ?' " And so these weak ones become by de- 
grees fatalists ; and it would seem, by their language, as if 
they were rather the patient victims of a cruel fate, the 
blame belonging not to them, but to God. 

The way in which stronger and more vicious characters 
arrive at this enmity is different. Humiliation degrades, 
and degradation produces anger ; you have but to go into 
the narrow and crowded streets of the most degraded por- 
tions of our metropolis, and there you will see the outcast 
turning with a look of defiance and hatred on respectability, 
merely because it is respectable : and this, brethren, many 
of us have seen, some of us have felt, in our relation towards 
God. That teri-ible demon voice stirs up within us, " Curse 
God and die." Hauntfed by furies, we stand, as it were, at 
bay, and dare to bid defiance to our Maker. Nothing so 
proves the original majesty of man as this terrible fact, that 
the creature can bid defiance to the Creator, and that man 
has it in him to become the enemy of God. 

We pass on, in the next place, to consider the doctrine of 
reconciliation. We need scarcely define what is meant by 
reconciliation. To reconcile is to produce harmony where 
there was discord, unity where before there was variance 



Reconciliation by Christ, 771 

We accept the apostle's definition of reconciliation. He says 
that " Christ hath made of twain one new man, so making 
peace." Now the reconciliation produced by Christ's atone- 
ment is fourfold : 

In the first place, Christ hath reconciled man to God, 

In the second place. He hath reconciled man to man. 

In the third place, He hath reconciled man to himself. 

And in the fourth place. He hath reconciled man to duty. 

In the first place, the atonement of the Redeemer has rec- 
onciled man to God, and that by a twofold step : by exhibit- 
ing the character of God ; and by that exhibition changing 
the character of man. 

Brethren, the sacrifice of Christ was the voice of God pro- 
claiming love. In this passage the apostle tells us that 
" Christ has reconciled us to God in the body of His flesh 
through death." We will not attempt to define what that 
sacrifice was — we will not philosophize upon it; for the 
more we philosophize the less we shall understand it. We 
are well content to take it as the highest exhibition and the 
noblest specimen of the law of our humanity — that great 
law, that there is no true blessedness Avithout sufi*ering, that 
every blessing we have comes through vicarious suffering. 
All that we have and enjoy comes from others' suffering. 
The life we enjoy is the result of maternal agony ; our very 
bread is only obtained after the toil and anguish of suffering 
myriads ; there is not one atom of the knowledge we possess 
now which has not, in some century of the world or other, 
been wrung out of Nature's secrets by the sweat of the brow 
or the sweat of the heart. The very peace which we are en- 
joying at this present day, how has that been purchased ? 
By the blood of heroes whose bodies are now lying moulder- 
ing in the trenches of a thousand battle-fields. 

This is the law of our humanity, and to this our Redeemer 
became subject — the law of life, self-surrender, without which 
reconciliation was impossible. And when the mind has com- 
prehended this, that the sacrifice of Christ was the manifesta- 
tion of the love of God, then comes the happy and blessed 
feeling of reconciliation. When a man has surrendered him- 
self in humbleness and penitence to God, and the proud spirit 
of self-excuse has passed away : when the soul has opened 
itself to all His influences and known their power : when the 
saddest and bitterest part of suffering is felt no longer as 
the wrath of the Judge but as the discipline of a Father : 
when the love of God has melted the soul, and fused it into 
charity : then the soul is reconciled to God, and God is 
reconciled to the soul : for it is a marvellous thins how th« 



772 Reconciliation by Christ, 

change of feelings within us changes God to us, or rathei 
those circumstances and things by which God becomes visi- 
ble to us. His universe, once so dark, becomes bright : life, 
once a mere dull, dreary thing, " dry as summer dust," 
springs up once more into fresh luxuriance, and we feel it to 
be a divine and blessed thing. 

We hear the voice of God as it was once heard in the 
garden of Eden whispering among the leaves : every sound, 
3nce so discordant, becomes music, the anthem of creation 
raised up, as it were, with everlasting hallelujahs to the 
eternal throne. Then it is that a man first knows his im- 
mortality, and the soul knows what is meant by infinitude 
and eternity ; not that infinitude which can be measured by 
miles, nor that eternity which can be computed by hours ; 
but the eternity of emotion. Let a man breathe but one 
hour of the charity of God, and feel but one true emotion of 
the reconciled heart, and then he knows forever what is 
meant by immortality, and he can understand the reality of 
his own. 

The second consequence of the Redeemer's atonement is 
the reconciliation of man to man. Of all the apostles, none 
have perceived so strongly as St. Paul that the death of 
Christ is the reconciliation of man to man. Take that one 
single expression in the Epistle to the Ephesians — " For He 
is our peace who hath made both one." Observe, I pray 
you, the imagery with which he continues, " and hath broken 
down the middle wall of partition." The veil or partition 
wall between the court of the Jew and Gentile was broken 
asunder at the crucifixion. St. Paul saw in the death of 
Christ a spiritual resemblance to that physical phenomenon. 
Christ was not only born of woman, but under the law ; and 
He could not become, as such, the Saviour of the world ; but 
when death had taken place, and He was no longer the Jew, 
but the Man, no longer bound by hmitations of time, and 
place, and country, then He became, as it were, a Spirit in 
the universe, no longer narrowed to place and to century, 
but universal, the Saviour of the Gentile as well as the Mes- 
siah of the Jew. 

Therefore it was that St. Paul called the flesh of Christ a 
veil, and said the death of Christ was the taking down of 
"the middle wall of partition" between Jew and Gentile: 
and therefore it is by the sacrifice of Christ, and by that 
alone, man can be thus reconciled to man : and on no other 
possible basis can there be a brotherhood of tlie human race. 
You may try other ways ; the men of the world have tried, 
and doubtless will go on trying, until they find that there is 



Reconciliation by Christ. 773 

no other way than this. They may try by the principle of 
selfishness, the principle of moral rule, or the principle of 
civil authority. Let the political economist come forward 
with his principle of selfishness, and tell us that this is that 
by which alone the wealth of nations can accrue. He may 
get a nation in which there are a wealthy few and miserable 
many, but not a brotherhood of Christians. Suppose you 
say^ men should love one another. Will that make them 
love one another ? You may come forward with the crush- 
ing rule of political authority. Papal Rome has tried it and 
failed. She bound up the masses of the human race as a 
gigantic iceberg ; but she could give only a temporary prin- 
ciple of unity and cohesion. 

Therefore we turn back once more to the cross of Christ : 
through this alone we learn there is one God, one Father, 
one baptism, one Elder Brother in whom all can be brothers. 
Bnt there is a something besides, a deeper principle still. 
We are told in this passage we can be reconciled to man by 
the body of Christ through death. And now, brethren, let 
us understand this. By the cross of Christ the apostle 
meant, reconciled by the spirit of the cross. And what was 
that spirit ? It was the spirit of giving, and of suffering, and 
of loving, because He had suffered. Say what we will, love 
is not gratitude for favors which have been received. Why 
is the child more beloved by the parent than the parent by 
the child? Why did the Redeemer love His disciples more 
than they loved their Master ? Benefits will not bind the 
affection; you must not expect that they will. You must 
suffer if you would love ; you must remember that " it is 
more blessed to give than to receive." The Apostle Paul 
felt this when he said reconciliation was produced through 
the body of the flesh of Christ by death. 

Once more : man becomes by the Redeemer's atonement 
reconciled to himself. 

That self-reconciliation is necessary, because we do not 
readily forgive ourselves. God may have forgiven us, but 
we can not forgive ourselves. You may obtain a remission 
of the past, but you can not forgive yourself and get back 
the feeling of self-respect, unity within, rest, by sitting still 
and believing that God has forgiA^en you, and that you have 
nothing left to look for? My brethren, there is a*spirit of 
self-torture within us which is but a perversion of nobleness, 
a mistake of the true principle. When you have done 
wrong, you want to suffer. Love demands a sacrifice, and 
only by sacrifice can it reconcile itself to self Then it is 
that the sacrifice of Christ replies to this, answers it, satisfiei 



774 Reconciliation by Christ, 

it, and makes it plain. The sacrifice of Christ was suffering 
in love, it was surrender to the will of God. The Apostle 
Paul felt this : when that Spirit was with him he was recon- 
ciled to himself. He says, "I am crucified with Christ, 
nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." If 
ever you devoted yourself to another's happiness or amelio- 
ration, so far and so long as you were doing that you forgave 
yourself; you felt the spirit of inward self-reconciliation ; and 
what we want is only to make that perpetual, to make that 
binding which we do by fits and starts, to feel ourselves a 
living sacrifice, to know that we are, in our highest and best 
state, victims, offered up in love on the great altar of the 
kingdom of Christ, offered by Him to God as the first-fruits 
of His sacrifice ; then we are reconciled to ourselves " by the 
blood of His flesh through death." 

And lastly, through the atonement of the Redeemer, man 
becomes reconciled to duty. There is no discord more terri- 
ble than that between man and duty. There are few of us 
who fancy we have found our own places in this world ; our 
lives, our partnerships, our professions, and our trades, are not 
those which we should have chosen for ourselves. There igf 
an ambition within us which sometimes makes us fancy we 
are fit for higher things, that we are adapted for other and 
better things than those to which we are called. But we 
turn again to the cross of Christ, and the mystery of life be 
comes plain. The life and death of Christ are the reconcilia- 
tion of man to the duties which he has to do. You can not 
study His marvellous life without perceiving that the whole 
of its details are uncongenial, mean, trivial, wretched cir- 
cumstances — from which the spirit of a man revolts. 

To bear the sneer of the Sadducee and the curse of the 
Pharisee ; to be rejected by His family and friends ; to be 
harassed by the petty disputes and miserable quarrels of His 
followers about their own personal precedence ; to be treated 
by the government of His country as a charlatan and a dema- 
gogue ; to be surrounded by a crowd of men, coming and 
going without sympathy ; to retire and find His leisure in- 
truded on and Himself pursued for ignoble ends — these were 
the circumstances of the Redeemer's existence here. Yet in 
these it was that the noblest life the world has ever seen was 
lived. He retired into the wilderness, and one by one put 
down all those visions that would have seduced Him from 
the higher path of duty ; the vision of comfort which tempt- 
ed Him to change the stones of this world into bread • the 
vision of ambition which tempted Him to make the king- 
doms of this world His own by seeking good through evilj 



Reconciliation by Christ T^j^ 

the vision which tempted Him to distrust God, and become 
important by pursuing some strange, unauthorized way of 
His own, instead of following the way of submission to the 
will of God. 

He ascended into the transfiguration mount, and there Hin 
Spirit converses with those of an elder dispensation, who had 
fought the fight before Him, Moses and Elias, and they spoke 
to Him of the triumph which He had to accomplish in death 
at Jerusalem. And He went down again with calm, serene, 
and transfigured faith, and there, at the very foot of the 
mount, He found His disciples engaged in some miserable 
squabble with the Scribes and the Pharisees about casting 
out a devil. And this life of His is the only interpretation 
of this life of ours — the reconciliation of our hearts with what 
we have to do. It is not by change of circumstances, but 
by firting our spirits to the circumstances in which God has 
placed us, that we can be reconciled to life and duty. If the 
duties before us be not noble, let us ennoble them by doing 
them in a noble spirit ; we become reconciled to life if we 
live in the Spirit of Him who reconciled the life of God with 
the lowly duties of servants. 

And now one word in conclusion. The central doctrine of 
Christianity is the atonement. Take that away and you ob- 
literate Christianity. If Christianity were merely the imita- 
tion of Christ, why then the imitation of any other good man, 
the Apostle Paul or John, might have become a kind of 
Christianity, If Christianity were merely martyrdom for 
truth, then, with the exception of a certain amount of degree, 
I see no difference between the death of Socrates and the 
death of Jesus Christ. But Christianity is more than this. 
It is the At-one-ment of the Soul. It is a reconciliation which 
the life and death of Christ have wrought out for this world 
' — the reconciliation of man to God, the reconciliation of man 
to man, the reconciliation of man to self, and the reconcilia- 
tiou of jnan io duty. 



77^ The Pre-eminence of Charity, 



XXI. 
THE PRE-EMINENCE OF CHARITY. 

" And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves : for chari^ 
■fehall cover the multitude of sins." — 1 Peter iv. 8. 

The grace of charity is exalted as the highest attainment 
of the Christian life by St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. John. 
These three men were very different from each other. Each 
was the type of a distinct order of character. And it is a 
proof that the Gospel is from God, and that the sacred writ- 
ings are inspired from a single Divine source, that personal 
peculiarities are not placed foremost in them, but the fore- 
most place is given by each to a grace which certainly was 
not the characteristic quality of all the three. 

It is said in these modern days that Christianity was a 
system elaborated by human intellect. Men, they say, philos- 
ophized and thought it out. Christianity, it is maintained, 
like ethics, is the product of human reason. Now had this 
been true, we should have found the great teachers of Chris- 
tianity each exalting that particular quality which was most 
remarkable in his own temperament. Just as the English 
honor truthfulness, and the French brilliancy, and the Hin- 
doos subtlety, and the Italians finesse — and naturally, be- 
cause these are predominant in themselves — we should have 
found the apostles insisting most strongly on those graces 
which grew most naturally in the soil of their own hearts. 

Indeed, in a degree it is so. St. John's character was ten- 
der, emotional and contemplative. Accordingly, his writings 
exhibit the feeling of religion and the predominance of the 
inner life over the outer. 

St. Paul was a man of keen intellect, and of soaring and 
aspiring thought which would endure no shackles on its free- 
dom. And his writings are full of the two subjects we might 
have expected from this temperament. He speaks a great 
deal of intellectual gifts ; very much of Christian liberty. 

St. Peter was remarkable for personal courage. A soldier 
by nature : frank, free, generous, irascible. In his writings, 
accordingly, we find a great deal said about martyrdom. 

But each of these men, so different from each other, exalts 
love above his own peculiar quality. It is very remarkable. 
J^ot merely does each call charity the highest, but each namea 



The Pre-emiiience of Chaidty. 777 

it in immediate connection with his own characteristic virtue, 
and declares it to be more Divine. 

St. John, of course, calls love the heavenliest. That we 
expect from St. John's character. " God is love. He that 
dwelleth in love dwelleth in God ;" " No man hath seen God 
at any time : if we love one another God dwelleth in us." 

But St. Paul expressly names it in contrast with the two 
feelings for which he was personally most remarkable, and, 
noble as they are, prefers it before them. First, in contrast 
with intellectual gifts. Thus, "Covet earnestly the best 
gifts : and yet show I unto you a more excellent way : 
though I speak with the tongue of men and of angels, and 
have not charity, it is nothing." Gifts are nothing in com- 
parison of charity. Again, " We know that Ave all have 
knowledge : knowledge puffeth up, but charity buildeth up." 
Knowledge is nothing in comparison. 

Next, in comparison of that liberty which was so dear to 
him. Christian liberty permitted the converts the use of 
meats, and the disregard of days from which the strict law 
of Judaism had debarred them. Well, but there were cases 
in which the exercise of that liberty might hurt the scruples 
of some weak Christian brother, or lead him to imitate the 
example against his conscience. "If thy brother be grieved 
wuth thy meat, now walkest thou not charitably P Liberty 
said. You have a right to indulge ; but Charity said. Refrain. 

So that, according to St. Paul, there is one thing, and one 
only, to which Christian liberty must be sacrificed. That 
one is Christian love. 

Now let us see how St. Peter does honor to the same 
grace, at the expense of that which w^e should have expected 
him to reckon the essential grace of manhood. Just before 
the text, we find the command, " Be sober, and watch unto 
prayer." This is a sentence out of St. Peter's very heart. 
For in it we have prayer represented as the night-watch of a 
warrior, armed, who must not sleep his watch away. " Be 
sober, and watch" — the language of the soldier and the sen- 
tinel ; words which remind you of him who drew his sword to 
defend his Master, and who in penitence remembered his own 
disastrous sleep when he was surprised as a sentry at his 
post. But immediately after this — "And, above all things^ 
nave fervent charity amongst yourselves." Sobriety, self- 
rule, manhood, courage, yes; but the life of them all, says 
St. Peter, the very crown of manhood, without which sobriety 
is but prudent selfishness, and courage is but brute instinct 
• — is love. 

Now I take that unanimity as a proof that the Gospel cornea 



77^ The Prc-einifience of Charity. 

from one Living Source. How came St. Peter and St. John, 
so different from each other, and St. Paul, who had had 
almost no communion with either of them, to agree, and 
agree so entnusiastically, in this doctrine — love is over all 
and above all; above intellect, freedom, courage — unless 
there had streamed into the mind and heart of each one of 
them light from One Source, even from Him the deepest prin- 
ciple of whose being, and the law of whose life and death, 
were love ? 

We are to try, to-day, to understand this sentence of 
St. Peter. It tells us two things — 

I. What charity is. 
n. What charity does. 

I. It is not easy to find one word in any language which 
rightly and adequately represents what Christ and His apos- 
tles meant by charity. All words are saturated w4th some im- 
perfect meaning. Charity has become identified wdth alms- 
giving. Love is appropriated to one particular form of hu- 
man affection, and that one with which self and passion mix 
inevitably. Philanthropy is a Avord too cold and negative. 

Let us define Christian charity in two sentences : 1. The 
desire to give. 2. The desire to bless. 

1. The desire to give. Let each man go deep into his own 
heart. Let him ask what that mysterious longing means 
which we call love, whether to man or God, when he has 
stripped from it all that is outside and accidental ; when he 
has taken from it all that is mixed with it and perverts it. 
Not in his worst moments — but in his best, what did that 
yearning mean ? I say it meant the desire to give. Not to 
get something, but to give something. And the mightier, the 
more irrepressible this yearning was, the more truly was his 
love love. To give — whether alms in the shape of money, 
bread, or a cup of cold water, or else self. But be sure, 
sacrifice, in some shape or other, is the impulse of love, and 
its restlessness is only satisfied and only gets relief in giving. 
For this, in truth, is God's own love, the will and the poAver to 
give. " It is more blessed to give than to receive." There- 
fore God is the only blessed One, because He alone gives and 
never receives. The universe, teeming with life, is but God's 
love expressing itself. He creates life by the giving of Him^ 
self He has redeemed the w^orld by the giving of His Son. 
" God so loved the w^orld that He gave His only begotten 
Son." The death of Christ w^as sacrifice. The life of God ia 
one perpetual sacrifice, or giving of Himself and shedding 
forth of His Spirit. Else it would not be love. 



The Pre-eminence of Charity, 779 

And so, when the poor sinful woman gave her costly oint- 
ment with a large profuseness, Christ saw in it an evidence 
of love. " She loved much." For love gives. 

2. The desire to bless. All love is this in a degree. Even 
weak and spurious love desires happiness of some kind for 
the creature that it loves. Almsgiving is often nothing 
more than indolence. We give to the beggar in the street, 
to save ourselves the trouble of finding out fitter objects. 
Still, indolent as it is, it is an indolent desire to prevent pain. 

What we call philanthropy is often calm and cool — too 
calm and cool to waste upon it the name of charity. But it 
is a calm and cool desire that human happiness were possi- 
ble. It is, in its weak way, a desire to bless. Now, the love 
whereof the Bible speaks, and of which we have but one 
perfect personification — viz., in the life of Christ — is the desire 
for the best and true blessedness of the being loved. It 
wishes the well-being of the whole man — body, soul, and 
spirit ; but chiefly spirit. 

Therefore, He fed the poor with bread. Therefore, He 
took His disciples into the wilderness to rest when they were 
weary. Therefore, " He gave Himself for us, that we, being 
dead unto sin, might live unto righteousness." For the king- 
dom of God is not bread only and repose, which constitute 
physical happiness, but goodness, too ; for that is blessed- 
ness. 

And the highest love is, therefore, the desire to make men 
good and Godlike ; it may wish, as a subordinate attainment, 
to turn this earth into a paradise of comfort by mechanical 
inventions ; but far above that, to transform into a kingdom 
of God, the domain of love, where men cease to quarrel and 
to envy, and to slander and to retaliate. " This, also, we 
wish," said St. Paul, " even your perfection." 

Concerning this charity we remark two points: 1. It is 
characterized as fervent. 2. It is capable of being cultivated. 

1. "Fervent." Literally intense, unremitting, unwearied. 
Now, there is a feeble sentiment which wishes well to all so 
long as it is not tempted to wish them ill, which does well to 
those who do well to them. But this, being merely senti- 
ment, will not last. Ruffle it and it becomes vindictive. In 
contrast with that, St. Peter calls Christ's spirit, which loves 
those who hate it, " fervent " charity, which does not tire, 
and can not be worn out ; which loves its enemies, and does 
goo,d to them that hate it. For Christian love is not the 
dream of a philosopher, sitting in his study, and benevolent- 
ly wishing the world were better than it is, congratulating 
himself, perhaps, all the time on the superiority shown by 



7B0 The Pre-eminence of Charity. 

himself over other less amiable natures. Injure one of these 
beaming sons of good-humor, and he bears malice : deep, un- 
relenting, refusing to forgive. But give us the man who, in 
stead of retiring to some small, select society, or rather as- 
sociation, where his own opinions shall be reflected, can mix 
with men where his sympathies are unmet, and his tastes 
Are jarred, and his views traversed, at every turn, and still 
'can be just, and gentle, and forbearing. 

, Give us the man who can be insulted and not retaliate ; 
meet rudeness and still be courteous ; the man who, like the 
Apostle Paul, buffeted and disliked, can yet be generous, 
and make allowances, and say, "I will very gladly spend and 
be spent for you, though the more abundantly I love you, 
the less I be loved." That is " fervent charity." 

2. Again, it is capable of being cultivated. We assume 
that, simply because it is enjoined. When an apostle says, 
'-^Have fervent charity among yourselves," it is plain that it 
would be a cruel mockery to command men to attain it if 
they could do nothing towards the attainment. It would be 
the same insult as saying to the deformed, "be beautiful." 
For it is wanton cruelty to command where obedience is im- 
possible. 

How shall we cultivate this charity? 

Now, I observe first, love can not be produced by a direct 
action of the soul upon itself You can not love by a resolve 
to love. That is as impossible as it is to move a boat by 
pressing it from within. The force with which you press on 
is exactly equal to that with which you press back. The re- 
action is exactly equal to the action. You force backward 
exactly as much as you force on. There are religious per- 
sons who, when they feel their affections cooled, strive to 
warm them by self-reproach, or by unnatural effort, or by the 
excitement of what they call revivals — trying to work them- 
3elves into a state of warm affection. There are others who 
hope to make feeble love strong by using strong words. 
Kow, for all this they pay a price. Effort of heart is fol- 
lowed by collapse. Excitement is followed by exhaustion. 
They will find that they have cooled exactly in that propor- 
tion in which they warmed, and at least as fast. 

It is as impossible for a man to work himself into a state 
of genuine fervent love as it is for a man to inspire himself. 
Inspiration is a breath and a life coming from without. 
Love is a feeling roused not from ourselves, but from some- 
thing outside ourselves. There are, however, two methods 
by which we may cultivate this charity. 

1. By doing acts which love demands. It is God'? mer« 



The Pre-eminence of Charity. 781 

ciful law that feelings are increased by acts clone on princi 
pie. If a man has not the feeling in its warmth, let him not 
wait till the feeling comes. Let him act with such feeling 
as he has ; with a cold heart if he has not got a warm one ; 
it will grow warmer while he acts. You may love a man 
merely because you have done him benefits^ and so become 
interested in him, till interest passes into anxiety, and anx- 
iety into affection. You may acquire courtesy of feeling at 
last, by cultivating courteous manner. The dignified polite- 
ness of the last century forced man into a kind of unselfish- 
ness in small things, which the abrupter manners of to-day 
will never teach. And say what men will of rude sincerity, 
those old men of urbane manners were kinder at heart with 
real good will, than we are with that rude bluffness which 
counts it a loss of independence to be courteous to any one. 
Gentleness of manner had some influence on gentleness of 
heart. 

So, in the same way, it is in things spiritual. If our hearts 
are cold, and we find it hard to love God and be affectionate 
to man, we must begin with duty. Duty is not Christian 
liberty, but is the first step toward liberty. We are free 
only when we love what we are to do, and those to whom 
we do it. Let a man begin in earnest with — I ought — he 
will end, by God's grace, if he persevere, with the free bless- 
edness of — I will. Let him force himself to abound in small 
ofiices of kindliness, attention, affectionateness, and all those 
for God's sake. By-and-by he w^ill feel them become the 
habit of his soul. By-and-by, walking in the conscientious- 
ness of refusing to retaliate when he feels tempted, he will 
cease to wish it : doing good and heaping kindness on those 
who injure him^ he will learn to love them. For he has 
spent a treasure there : "And where the treasure is, there 
will the heart be also." 

2. The second way of cultivating Christian love is by con- 
templating the love of God. You can not move the boat 
from within ; but you may obtain a purchase from without. 
You can not create love in the soul by force from within it- 
self- but you may move it from a point outside itself God's 
love is the point from which to move the soul. Love begets 
love. Love believed in, produces a return of love : we can 
not love because we must. " Must " kills love ; but the 
law of our nature is that we love in reply to love. No one 
ever yet hated one whom he believed to love him truly. 
We may be provoked by the pertinacity of an affection 
which asks what we can not give ; but we can not hate the 
true love which does not ask but gives. Now this is th« 



782 The Pre-eminence of Charity, 

central truth of Christ's Gospel : " We love Him because He 
first loved us;" "Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought 
also to love one another ;" " God is love." 

It is the one, almost only struggle of religious life, to be- 
lieve this. In spite of all the seeming cruelties of this 
life ; in spite of the clouded mystery in which God has 
shrouded Himself; in spite of pain and the stern aspect 
of human life, and the gathering of thicker darkness and 
more solemn silence round the soul as life goes on, simply to 
believe that God is love, and to hold fast to that, as a man 
holds on to a rock with a desperate grip when the salt surf 
and the driving waves sweep over him and take the breath 
away — I say that is the one fight of Christian life, compared 
with which all else is easy: when we believe that, human af- 
fections are easy. It is easy to be generous, and tolerant, 
and benevolent, when we are sure of the heart of God, and 
when the little love of this life, and its coldnesses, and its un- 
returned afiections, are more than made up to us by the cer- 
tainty that our Father's love is ours. But when we lose 
sight of that, though but for a moment, the heart sours, and 
men seem no longer worth the loving : and wrongs are mag- 
nified, and injuries can not be forgiven, and life itself drags 
on, a mere death in life. A man may doubt any thing and 
every thing, and still be blessed, provided only he holds fast 
to that conviction. Let all drift from him like sea-weed on 
life's ocean. So long as he reposes on the assurance of the 
eternal faithfulness of the Eternal Charity, his spirit at least 
can not drift. There are moments, I humbly think, when we 
understand those triumphant words of St. Paul, " Let God be 
true, and every man a liar." 

n. What charity does. 

It coA^ereth a multitude of sins. 

Now the only question is, lohose sins does charity cover ? 
Is it that the sins of the charitable man are covered by his 
charity in God's sight ? Or is it the sins of others over 
which charity throws a mantle so as not to see them ? 

Some wise and good men have said the first. Love oblit- 
erates sin in the sight of God ; and assuredly it might be 
this that St. Peter meant. No doubt whole years of folly 
we outlive " in His unerring sight, who measures life by 
love." Recollect our Master's own words — " Her sins, which 
are many, are forgiven her : for she loved much." 

Nevertheless, that does not seem to be the meaning of 
this passage. A large number of deep thinkers have been 
convinced that St. Peter is here describing Christianity, and 



The Pre-emi^neitce of Charity, 783 

the description which he gives of it as most characteristic is, 
that it hides out of sight, and refuses to contemplate, a mul- 
titude of sins which malevolence would delight to see. It 
throws a veil over them and covers them. At all events, 
this is true of Christian charity : and we shall consider the 
passage in that sense to-day. 

There are three ways, at least, in which love covers sin. 

1. In refusing to see small faults. Every man has his 
faults, his failings, peculiarities, eccentricities. Every one of 
us finds himself crossed by such failings of others, from hour 
to hour. And if he were to resent them all, or even notice 
all, life would be intolerable. If for every outburst of hasty 
temper, and for every rudeness that wounds us in our daily 
path, we were to demand an apology, require an explanation, 
or resent it by retaliation, daily intercourse would be impos- 
sible. The very science of social life consists in that gliding 
tact which avoids contact with the sharp angularities of 
character, which does not argue about such things, does not 
seek to adjust or cure them all, but covers them, as if it did 
not see. 

Exceedingly wise was that conduct of the Roman pro 
consul at Corinth which we read of in the Acts. The Jews, 
with Sosthenes at their head, had brought a charge of heresy 
against the Christians, and tried it at the Roman law. Gal 
lio perceived that it was a vexatious one, and dismissed it; 
drove them from the judgment-seat. Whereupon the Greeks, 
indignant at the paltry virulence of the accusation, took Sos- 
thenes, in his way from the judgment-seat, and beat him even 
in Gallio's presence. It is written, " Gallio cared for none of 
these things." He took no notice. He would not see. It 
was doubtless illegal and tumultuous, a kind of contempt of 
court — a great offense in Roman law. But Gallio preferred 
permitting a wholesome outburst of healthy indignation, to 
carrying out the law in its letter. For he knew that in that 
popular riot human nature was throwing off an incubus. It 
was a kind of irregular justice, excusable because of its 
provocation. And so Gallio would not see. He covered the 
transgression in a wise and willful blindness. 

That which the Roman magistrate did from wise policy, 
the Christian spirit does in a diviner way. It throws over 
such things a cloak of love. It knows when it is wise not to 
see. That microscopic distinctness in which all faults ap- 
pear to captious men, who are forever blaming, dissecting, 
complaining, disappears in the large, calm gaze of love. 
And oh ! it is this spirit which our Christian society lacks, 
and which we shall never get till we begin each one with his 



784 The Pre-emmence of Charity. 

own heart. What we want is, in one word, that graceful 
tact and Christian art which can bear and forbear. 

That was a rude, " unpardonable " insult offered by Pe- 
ter to his Master when he denied Him. In His hour of trial^ 
he refused to seem even to know Him. We should have said, 
I will never forget that. The Divine charity covered all. 
Ask' ye how ? " Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me ? Feed 
my sheep." 

2. Love covers sin by making large allowances. In all 
evil there is a " soul of goodness." Most evil is perverted 
good. For instance, extravagance is generosity carried to 
excess. Revenge is sometimes a sense of justice which has 
put no restraint upon itself. Woman's worst fault is per- 
verted self-sacrifice. Incaution comes from innocence. Kow 
there are some men who see all the evil, and never trace, 
never give themselves the trouble of suspecting the root of 
goodness out of which it sprung. There are others who love 
to go deep down, and see why a man came to do w^rong, 
and whether there was not some excuse, or some redeeming 
cause : in order that they may be just. Just, as " God is 
just, awe? the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus." 

Not as the passage is sometimes quoted — just, and yet the 
justifier ; as if there were some difficulty in reconciling God's 
justice and God's mercy : but just and the justifier, just and 
therefore the justifier. Merciful because just. 

Now human life, as it presents itself to these two diiferent 
eyes, the eye of one who sees only evil, and that of him who 
sees evil as perverted good, is two different things. Take 
an instance. ISTot many years ago, a gifted English writer 
presented us with a history of ancient Christianity. To his 
eye the early Church presented one great idea, almost only 
one. He saw corruption written everywhere. In the his- 
tory of the ascetics, of the nuns, of the hermits, of the early 
bishops, he saw nothing noble, nothing aspiring. Every- 
where the one dark spectacle of the Man of Sin. In public 
and in private life, in theology and practice, within and with* 
out, everywhere pollution. Another historian, a foreigner, 
has written the history of the same times, Avith an intellect 
as piercing to discover the very first germ of error, but with 
a calm, large heart, which saw the good out of which the er- 
ror sprung, and loved to dwell upon it, delighting to trace 
the lineaments of God, and discern His Spirit working where 
another could see only the spirit of the devil. And you rise 
from the two books with different views of the world ; from 
the one, considering the world as a devil's world, corrupting 
towards destruction; from the other, notwithstanding all, 



The Pre-eminence of Charity, 785 

feeling triumphantly that it is God's world, and that His 
Spirit works gloriously below it all. You rise from the study 
with different feelings : from the one, inclined to despise your 
species ; from the other, able joyfully to understand in part 
why God so loved the world, and what there is in man to 
love, and what there is, even in the lost, to seek and save. 

Now that is the " charity which covereth a multitude of 
sins." 

It understands by sympathy. It is that glorious nature 
which has affinity with good under all forms, and loves to 
find it, to believe in it, and to see it. And therefore such 
men — God's rare and best ones — learn to make allowances ; 
not from weak sentiment, which calls wrong right, but from 
that h-eavenly charity which sees right lying at the root of 
wrong. So the Apostle Paul learned to be candid even to- 
wards himself " I obtained mercy, because I did it igno' 
rantly, in unbelief" His very bigotry and persecuting spirit 
could be justified by God, and by men who see like God. It 
was wrong, very wrong ; he did not palliate it ; he felt that it 
had made him " the chief of sinners," but he discerned that his 
had been zeal directed wrongly — not hate, but inverted love. 

So too, over the dark grave of Saul the suicide, the love 
of friendship could shed one ray of hope. He who remem- 
bered of Saul only his nobler nature and his earlier days, 
when his desolate character was less ambiguous — the man 
after God's own heart — whose love refused to part with the 
conviction that that light which was from God was not 
quenched forever, though it had set in clouds and thick dark- 
ness — dared to say, "Saul and Jonathan were lovely in their 
lives, and in their deaths they were not divided." Would 
you or I have dared to hope over a grave like Saul's ? So, 
too, over the grave of the prophet whose last act was disobe- 
dience, love still dared to hope, and the surviving prophet 
remembered only that he had shared the gift of prophecy 
with himself "Alas, my brother H A sinner, who had died 
in sin, but as our own burial service nobly dares to say, in 
the hope of intense charity, " To rest in Thee, as our hope is 
this our brother doth." And so, lastly, in the blackest guilt 
the earth has seen — in memory of which we, in our Christian 
charity, after eighteen hundred years, brand the descendant 
Tews with a curse, which is only slowly disappearing from 
our minds — there was one Eye which could discern a ground 
on which to make allowance, "Father, forgive them; for they 
know not what they do." 

Let us dismiss from our minds one false suspicion. The 
man who can be most charitable is not the man who is him 



786 The Fre-eminence of Charity, 

self most lax. Deep knowledge of human nature tells us it 
is exactly the reverse. He who shows the rough and thorny 
road to heaven is he who treads the primrose path himself. 
Be sure that it is the severe and pitiless judge and censor of 
others' faults on whom, at a venture, you may most safely fix 
the charge, "Thou art the man !" I know not why, but un^. 
relenting severity proves guilt rather than innocence. How: 
much purity was proved by David's sentence of an imagin* 
ary criminal to death ? How much by the desire of those 
Pharisees to stone the woman taken in adultery ? Convicted 
by their own consciences, they went out one by one ; yet 
they had longed to stone her. No : be sure you must be 
free from sin in proportion as you would judge with the al- 
lowance and the charity of Christ Jesus, " Tempted in all 
points, yet without sin." " Wherefore also. He is a merciful 
High-priest." 

3. Lastly, charity can tolerate even intolerance. Let no 
man think that he can be tolerant or charitable as a matter 
of self-indulgence. For real charity and real toleration he 
must pay a price. So long as they are merely negative — so 
long as they mean only the permission to every one to think 
his own thoughts and go his own way — the world will bear 
them. But so soon as charity becomes action, and toleration 
becomes earnest, basing themselves on a principle, even this 
— the conviction that at the root of many an error there lies 
a truth, and within much evil a central heart of goodness, 
and below unwise and even opposite forms, the same essen- 
tial meaning — so soon charity and toleration exasperate the 
world secular, or so-called religious. 

For instance, if, with St. Paul, you affirm, " He that ob- 
serveth the day, observeth it to the Lord ; and he that ob- 
serveth not the day, to the Lord he observeth it not," toler- 
ating both the observance and the non-observance, when you 
perceive the desire of doing God's will existing in both, you 
can not avoid the charge of being careless about the question 
of the sanctities of a day of rest. Or if, w^ith St. Paul, you say 
of some superstitious idolatry, that men ignorantly worship 
God in it, their worship being true, their form false — you can 
not avoid the stigma of seeming for the time to be tending 
to that idolatry. Or if, with the Son of God, you recognize 
the enthusiasm of nature, which passion had led astray in de- 
vious paths, you can not escape the imputation of being " a 
friend of publicans and sinners." This is the price which a 
man must pay for charity. His Master could not escape the 
price, nor can he. 

And then comes the last and most difficult lesson of love 



The Unjust Steward. 787 

to make allowances even for the uncharitable. For surely 
below all that uncharitableness which is so common, there is 
often a germ of the life of love ; and beneath that intoler- 
ance, which may often wound ourselves, a loving and a ca/ 
did eye may discern zeal for God. Therefore St. Paul ^ 
even in the Jews, his bitterest foes, that " they had a zea' 
God, but not according to knowledge." And therefore ^->. 
Stephen prayed, with his last breath, " Lord, lay not this sin 
to their charge." Earth has not a spectacle more glorious 
or more fair to show than this — love tolerating intolerance ; 
charity covering, as with a veil, even the sin of the lack of 
charity. 



XXII. 
THE UNJUST STEWARD. 



*' And the lord commended the unjust steward because he had done wisely : 
for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children 
of light. And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon 
of unrighteousness ; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting 
habitations." — Lukexvi. 8, 9. 

There is at first sight a difficulty in the interpretation 
of this parable ; apparently there is a commendation of evil 
by Christ. We see a bad man is held up for Christian imita- 
tion. Now let us read the parable. 

"And He said also unto his disciples. There was a certain 
rich man, which had a steward ; and the same was acc^.used 
unto him that he had wasted his goods. And he called him, 
and said unto him, How is it that I hear this of thee? give 
an account of thy stewardship ; for thou mayest be no longer 
steward. Then the steward said within himself. What shall 
I do ? for my lord taketh away from me the stewardship : I 
can not dig ; to beg I am ashamed. I am resolved what to 
do, that, when I am put out of the stewardship, they may re- 
ceive me into their houses. So he called every one of his 
lord's debtors unto him, and said unto the first, How much 
owest thou unto my lord ? And he said, A hundred meas- 
ures of oil. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, and sit 
down quickly, and write fifty. Then said he to another. And 
how much owest thou ? And he said, A hundred measures 
of wheat. And he said unto him. Take thy bill, and write 
fourscore. And the lord commended the unjust steward be- 
cause he had done wisely : for the children of this world are 
in their generation wiser than the children of light." 



788 The Unjust Steward. 

The difficulty we have spoken of passes away when wg 
have learned to distinguish the essential aim of the parable 
from its ornament or drapery. There is in every parable the 
main scope, and the ornament or drapery. Sometimes, if we 
press too closely the drapery in which the aim and intention 
of the parable is clothed, we get quite the contrary of our 
Redeemer's meaning. For example, in the parable of the un^ 
just judge there is the similarity, that both God and the un- 
just judge yield to importunate prayer ; but there is this 
difference, that the judge does it from weariness, and God 
from love. The judge grants the widow's request, lest, he 
says, " by her continual coming she weary me ;" — and God 
answers the petitions of His people from love : and encour- 
ages earnestness and sincerity in prayer because it brings 
.nan nearer to Him, elevating and ennobling him, while it 
makes him feel his entire dependence on God. 

So here in this parable : it is the lord — it is not Christ, but 
the master — who commended the unjust steward. And he 
did so, not because he had acted honorably, faithfully, grate- 
fully, but because he had acted wisely. He takes the single 
point of prudence, foresight, forecast. 

Let us consider the possibility of detaching a single quali- 
ty from a character, and viewing it separately. 

So do we speak in everyday life. We quote a passage ad- 
miringly, from an infidel writer — for example. Gibbon ; but 
thereby we do not approve his infidelity. We may admire 
the manly bearing of a prisoner in the dock or on the scaffold, 
while we reprobate the crime which brought him there. We 
may speak enthusiastically of a great philosopher ; we do not 
therefore say he is a great man, or a good man. Perhaps we 
are charmed by a tale of successful robbery ; we wonder at 
its ingenuity, its contrivance, feel even a kind of respect for 
the man who could so contrive it : but no man who thus re- 
lates it is understood to recommend felony. We admire the 
dexterity of a juggler as dexterity. 

So it was with this parable of Christ. He fastened on a 
single point, excluding all other considerations. The man 
had planned, he had seen difficulties, overcome them, marked 
out his path, held to it steadily, crowned himself with suc- 
cess. So far he is an example. The way in which he used 
his power of forecasting may have been bad ; but forecast it' 
self is good. Our subject to-day includes : 

I. The wisdom of this world. 
II. The pattern of Christian consistency. 

I. The wisdom of this world. There are three ciassei 



The Unjust Steward, 7S9 

of men. Those who believe that one thnig is needful, and 
choose the better part, who believe in and live for eternity ; 
— these are not mentioned here : those who believe in the 
world and live for it ; and those who believe in eternity, and 
half live for the world. 

Forethought for self made the steward ask himself, "What 
shall I do ?" Here is the thoughtful, contriving, sagacious 
man of the world. In the affairs of this world, the man who 
does not provide for self, if he enter into competition with 
the world on the world's principles, soon finds himself thrust 
aside ; he will be put out. It becomes necessary to jostle 
and struggle in the great crowd if he would thrive. With 
him it is not, first the kingdom of God ; but first, what he 
shall eat, and what he shall drink, and wherewithal shall he 
be clothed. 

Note the kind of superiority in this character that is com- 
mended. There are certain qualities which really do elevate . 
a man in the scale of being. He who pursues a plan steadi- 
ly is higher than he who lives by the hour. You can not but 
respect such a one. The value of self-command and self-de- 
nial is exemplified in the cases of the diplomatist who mas- 
ters his features while listening ; the man of pleasure who is 
prudent in his pleasures ; the man of the world who keeps his 
temper and guards his lips. How often, after speaking hastily 
the thought which was uppermost, and feeling the cheek 
burn, you have looked back in admiration on some one who 
held his tongue even though under great provocation to speak. 

Look at some hard-headed, hard-hearted man, with a front 
of brass, carrying out his worldly schemes with a settled plan, 
and a perseverance w^hich you perforce must admire. There 
may be nothing very exalted in his aim, but there is some- 
thing very marvellous in the enduring, patient, steady pur- 
suit of his object. 

You see energies of the highest order are brought into play. 
It is not a being of mean powers that the world has beguiled, 
but a mind far-reaching, vast ; throwing immortal powers on 
things of time; on a scheme, perhaps, which breaks up like a 
cloud-phantom or melts like an ice-palace. 

It is a marvellous spectacle — a man reaching forward to se- 
cure a habitation, a home, that will last. A man counting his 
freehold more his own than the pension for life: sagacious, 
meeting with entire success : the success which always attends 
consistency in any pursuit. If a tradesman resolve to save 
and be frugal, barring accidents, he will realize a competency 
or a fortune. If you make it your business to please, you 
will be welcome in society. So we find it in this parable. 



790 The Unjust Steward, 

This man, one of the world, contrived to secure for himself % 
home. And the children of this world are consistent, and 
force the world to yield them a home. It is no use saying 
the people of the world are not happy. 

I shall now endeavor to explain this parable. The term 
" steward " is not to be taken exactly in its modern meaning. 
The tenants paid their rents, not in money, but in kind, that 
is, in produce, and the rent was a certain proportion of the 
crop, and would therefore vary according to the harvest. 
Say, for illustration, the landlord — here called " the lord "-— 
received as rent the tenth part of the crop ; then, if the 
produce of an olive-yard was a thousand measures of oil, 
" the lord " was entitled to a hundred measures. And sim- 
ilarly in the case of an arable farm, a rent of a hundred meas- 
ures of wheat would represent a crop of a thousand measures. 
According to the parable, it appears that it depended on the 
good faith of the tenant to state truly the amount gathered 
in ; and against false returns the chief check was provided in 
the steward. If he acquiesced in the deception, there was 
generally no detection or check. We read in this case he 
permitted the bill to be taken, and an account given, in the 
one instance of eight hundred, in the other, of five hundred 
instead of a thousand measures. Thus he got gratitude from 
the tenants, who considered him a benevolent man, and count- 
ed his expulsion an injustice. We have here a specimen of 
the world's benevolence and the world's gratitude. Let us 
do the world justice. Gratitude is given profusely. Help 
a man to build his fortune, and you will win gratitude. 

The steward got commendation from his lord for his world- 
ly wisdom. Such is the wisdom of this world — wise in its 
contriving selfishness ; wise in its masterly superiority ; wise 
in its adaptation of means to ends ; wise in its entire success. 

But the success is only in their generation, and their wis- 
dom is only for their generation. If this world be all, it is 
wise to contrive for it and live for it. But if not, then con- 
sider — the word is, " Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be 
required of thee ; then whose shall those things be that thou 
hast gotten ?" 

II. In contrast with the wisdom of the children of this 
world, the Redeemer shows the inconsistencies of the chil- 
dren of light. "The children of this world are wiser in their 
generation than the children of light." 

This is evidently not true of all. There have been men 
who have given their bodies to be burned for the truth's sake ; 
men who have freely sacrificed this present world for the 



The Unjust Steward, 791 

next. To say that the wisest of the sons of this world is half 
as wise as they, were an insult to the sanctifying Spirit. 

But " children of light " is a wide term. There is a dif' 
ference between life and light. To have light is to perceive 
truth and know duty. To have life is to be able to live out 
truth and to perform duty. Many a man has clear light who 
has not taken hold of life. Many a man is the child of light 
who does not walk as the child of life. 

So far as a man feels that eternity is long, time short, so 
far he is a child of light. So far as he believes the body noth- 
ing in comparison with the soul, the present in comparison 
with the future ; so far as he has felt the power of sin, and 
the sanctifying power of the death of Christ ; so far as he 
comprehends the character of God as exhibited in Jesus 
Christ — he is a child of light. 

Now the accusation is, that in his generation he does not 
walk so wisely as the child of the world does in his. The 
children of the world believe that this world is of vast im- 
portance. They are consistent with their belief, and live for 
it. Out of it they manage to extract happiness. In it they 
contrive to find a home. 

To be a child of light implies duty as well as privilege. 
It is not enough to have the light, if we do not " walk in the 
light." " If we say we have fellowship with Him, and walk 
in darkness, we lie, and do not the truths" 

And to hold high principles and live on low ones is Chris- 
tian inconsistency. We £ire all more or less inconsistent. 
There is no man whose practice is not worse than his pro- 
fession. ISTo one who does not live below his own standard. 
But absolute inconsistency is, when a man's life, taken as a 
whole, is in opposition to his acknowledged views and prin- 
ciples. If a man say that ' it is more blessed to give than to 
receive," and is forever receiving, scarcely ever giving, he is 
inconsistent. If he profess that to please God is the only 
thing worth living for, and his plans, and aims, and contriv- 
ances are all to please men, he is wise for the generation of 
the children of the world ; for the generation of the " chil- 
dren of light" he is not wise. See, then, the contrast. 

The wisdom of the steward consisted in forecasting. He 
felt that his time was short, and he lost not a moment. 
Every time he crossed a field it was with the feeling. This is 
no longer mine. Every time he left his house he felt, I shall 
soon leave it to come back no more. Every time he went 
into a tenant's cottage he felt, The present is all that may be 
given me to make use of this opportunity. Therefore, he 
Bays with dispatch, "Take thy bill, and write down." 



79- The Unjust Steward, 

l^ow the want of Christian wisdom consists in this, that 
our stewardship is drawing to a close, and no provision ig 
made for an eternal future. We are all stewards. Every 
day, every age of life, every year, gives us superintendence 
over something which we have to use, and the use of which 
tells for good or evil on eternity. 

Childhood and manhood pass. The day passes : and, as its 
close draws near, the Master's voice is heard — "Thou may est 
be no longer steward." And what are all these outward 
gymbols but types and reminders of the darker, longer night 
that is at hand ? One by one, we are turned out of all oui 
homes. The summons comes. The man lies down on his 
bed for the last time ; and then comes that awful moment, 
the putting down the extinguisher on the light, and the grand 
rush of darkness on the spirit. 

Let us now consider our Saviour's application of this parable. 

" And I say unto you. Make to yourselves friends of the 
mammon of unrighteousness ; that, when ye fail, they may 
receive you into everlasting habitations. He that is faithful 
in that which is least is faithful also in much : and he that is 
unjust in the least is unjust also in much. If therefore ye 
have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will 
commit to your trust the true riches ? And if ye have not 
been faithful in that which is another man's, who shall give 
you that which is your own ?" 

There are two expressions to be explained. 

1. "Mammon of unrighteousness." Mammon is the name 
of a Syrian god, who presided over wealth. Mammon of un- 
righteousn jss imeans the god whom the unrighteous worship 
— wealth. 

It is not necessarily gold. Any wealth ; wealth being 
weal or well-being. Time, talents, opportunity, and author- 
ity, all are wealth. Here the steward had influence. 

It is called the mammon of unrighteousness, because it is 
ordinarily used, not well, but ill. Power corrupts men. 
Riches harden more than misfortune. 

2. " Make friends of" This is an ambiguous expression. 
Those who know it to be so scarcely are aware how widely 
it is misunderstood. To make friends of, has, in English, two 
meanings. To make friends of a man, in our idiom, is to con- 
vert him into our ally. We meet with those who imagine 
that the command is to make riches our friends instead of 
our enemies. 

But the other meaning is " of," ^. e., out of, by the use of, 
to create friends — in a word, to use these goods of time in 
such a way as to secure eternal well-being. 



The Unjust Steward. 793 

"Make to yourselves friends." I will explain " friends *' 
as a home. There may seem to be great legality in this in 
junction. 

Yet on this subject the words of Scripture are very strong. 
" Sell that thou hast, and give unto the poor, and thou shall 
have treasure in heaven ;" "Provide yourselves bags that wax 
not old ; a treasure in the heavens, that fadeth not away ;" 
" Lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where neither 
moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break 
through and steal." Do not be afraid of the expression. 
Let it stand in all its bold truthfulness. Goodness done in 
Christ secures blessedness. A cup of cold water, given in 
the name of Christ, shall not lose its reward. 

Merit in these things there is none. Oh, the man who 
knows the torment of an evil heart, and the man who is 
striving to use his powers wisely, is not the man to talk of 
merit in the sight of God. There is no truth more dear to 
our hearts than this — not by merit, but by grace, does heaven 
become ours. 

But let us put it in another way. Wise acts, holy and un- 
selfish deeds, secure friends. Wherever the steward went 
he found a friend. The acts of his beneficence were spread 
over the whole of his master's estate. Go where he Avould, 
he would receive a welcome. In this way our good actions 
become our friends. 

And if it be no dream which holy men have entertained, 
that on this regenerated earth the risen spirits shall live 
again in glorified bodies, then it were a thing of sublime an- 
ticipation, to know that every spot hallowed by the recol- 
lection of a deed done for Christ, contains a recollection 
which would be a friend. Just as the patriarchs erected an 
altar when they felt God to be near, till Palestine became 
dotted with these memorials, so would earth be marked by a 
good man's life with those holiest of all friends, the remem- 
brance of ten thousand little nameless acts of piety and love. 

Lastly, they are everlasting habitations. 

If the children of the world be right, it is not all well with 
them ; but if the children of light be right, it is well ever- 
lastingly. 

Nothing is eternal but that which is done for God and 
others. That which is done for self dies. Perhaps it is not 
wrong : but it perishes. You say it is pleasure, well — enjoy 
it. But joyous recollection is no longer joy. That which 
ends in self is mortal ; that alone which goes out of self into 
God lasts fovever. 



794 ^^^ Orphanage of Moses. 



xxm. 

THE ORPHANAGE OF MOSES. 

A SERMON PREACHED ON BEHALF OF THE ORPHAN SOCIETY, 

*' And when she had opened it, she saw the child : and, behold, the babe 
wept. And she had compassion on him, and said. This is one of the Hebrews' 
children. Then said his sister to Pharaoh's daughter. Shall I go and call to 
thee a nurse of the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for thee? 
And Pharaoh's daughter said to her. Go. And the maid went and called tha 
child's mother. And Pharaoh's daughter said unto her. Take this child away, 
and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages. And the woman took 
the child, and nursed it. " — Exod. ii. 6-9. 

This is the account given of the discovery of a foundling 
orphan. Moses was an orphan — 6p(paydc, bereaved ; ordi- 
Jiarily it means one bereaved by death. But it matters not 
whether it is by death or otherwise ; it is truly an orphan 
if it be in any manner deprived of a parent's care. Here 
the child Moses was not bereaved by death, but by political 
circumstances. 

In the book from whence our text is taken, we are told that 
three laws were enacted against the liberties of Israel: 

1. To keep down the population the political economy 
of those days devised, as a preventive check, the slaughter 
of the males. 

2. To prevent their acquiring any political importance, 
the officers set over them were Egyptians. No Israelite was 
eligible to any office — not even as a taskmaster. 

3. To prevent their acquiring knowledge, they were pro- 
hibited from the slightest leisure : their lives were made 
bitter with hard bondage, in brick and mortar. 

No penal statutes were ever more complete than these. 
If any penal statutes could have prevented the growth of 
this injured nation, these must have succeeded. Numerically 
limited, rendered politically insignificant, and intellectually 
feeble, the slavery of Israel was complete. 

But wherever governments enact penal laws which are 
against the laws of God, those governments or nations are, 
by the sure and inevitable process of revolution, preparing 
for themselves destruction. As when you compress yielding 
water, it burst at last. 

Pharaoh's laws were against all the laws of Nature, or, 



The Orphanage of Moses, 795 

more properly speaking, against the laws of God : and Ma- 
ture was slowly working against Pharaoh. He had made 
God his enemy. 

Against these law^s of Pharaoh a mother's heart revolted. 
She hid her child for three months. Disobedience to this 
Egyptian law, we read, was faith in God — so says the Epistle 
to the Hebrews. " By faith Moses, when he was born, was 
hid three months of his parents, because they saw he was a 
proper child ; and they were not afraid of the king's com- 
mandment." 

At last concealment was no longer possible, and the 
mother placed her child in an ark among the reeds of the 
river Nile. And there a foundling orphan he lay, who was 
to be the future emancipator and lawgiver of Israel. 

In order to understand these verses, I divide them into 
two branches ; 

L The claims of the orphan. 
n. The orphan's education. 

And first. By apparent accident, if there be such a thing 
in this world of God's, the daughter of Pharaoh came down 
to the river to wash, and, among the reeds she saw the chest 
in which lay the child. 

Now the first claim put forward on her compassion was 
the claim of infancy. 

The chest was opened. The princess "saw the child." 
That single sentence contains an argument. It was an 
appeal to the woman's heart. It mattered not that she was 
a princess, nor that she belonged to the proudest class of the 
most exclusive nation in the w^orld. Pank, caste, nationality, 
all melted before the great fact of womanhood. She was a 
woman, and before her lay an outcast child. 

Now, let us observe, that feeling which arose here was 
spontaneous. She did not feel compassion because it was 
fier duty so to feel, but because it was her nature. The law 
of Egypt forbade her to feel so for a Hebrew child. 

We commit a capital error when we make feeling a matter 
of command. To make feelings a subject of law destroys 
,their beauty and spontaneity. 

When we say ought — that a woman ought to feel so and 
60 — we state a fact, not a command. We say that it is her 
nature, and that she is unnatural if she does not. There is 
something wrong — her nature is perverted. But no com- 
mand can make her feel thus or thus. Law, applied to feel- 
ing, only makes hypocrites. 

God has provided for humanity by a plan more infallible 



79^ The Orphanage of Moses, 

than system, by implanting feeling in our natures. It was a 
heathen felt thus. 

Do not fancy that Christianity created these feelings of 
tenderness and compassion by commanding them. Chris- 
tianity declares them, commands them, and sanctions them, 
because they belong to man's unadulterated nature. Chris- 
tianity acknowledges them, stamps them with the divine 
seal ; but they existed before, and were found even among 
the Egyptians and Assyrians. What Christianity did for all 
these feelings was exactly w^hat the creation of the sun, as 
given in the Mosaic account, did for the light then existing. 
There was light before, but the creation of the sun was the 
gathering all the scattered rays of light into one focus. 
Christian institutions, asylums, hospitals, are only the reduc- 
tion into form of feelings that existed before. 

So it is, that all that heathenism held of good and godlike, 
Christianity acknowledges and adopts — centralizes. It is 
human — Christian — ours. 

2. Consider the degi.idation of this child's origin. "This 
is one of the Hebrews' children." The exclusiveness of the 
Egyptian social system was as strong as that of the Hindoo. 
There was no intermixture between caste and caste — between 
priest and merchant. This child was, moreover, a Hebrew — 
a slave — ^an alien — reckoned a hereditary enemy, and to be 
crushed. 

In these rigid feelings of caste distinction the princess 
was brought up. The voice of society said. It is but a 
Hebrew. The mightier voice of nature — no, of God — spake 
within her, and said. It is a human being — bone of your 
bone, and sharing the same life. 

That moment the princess of Egypt escaped from the 
trammels of time-distinctions and temporary narrowness, 
and stood upon the rock of the Eternal. So long as the 
feeling lasted, she breathed the spirit of that kingdom in 
which there is " neither Jew nor Gentile, barbarian, Scythian, 
bond, nor free." So long as the feeling lasted, she breathed 
the atmosphere of Him who " came not to be ministered unto 
but to minister." 

She was animated bj^ His Spirit who came to raise the 
abject, to break the bond of the oppressor. She felt as He 
felt, when she recognized that the very degradation of the 
child was a claim upon her royal compassion. 

3. The last reason we find for this claim was its unpro- 
tected state — it wept. Those tears told of a conscious 
want — the felt want of a mother's arms. But they sug- 
gested to the Egyptian princess the remembrance of a 



The Orphanage of Moses. 797 

danger of which the child was unconscious — helpless ex^ 
posure to worse evils — famine ; the Nile flood ; the croco- 
dile. And the want of which the exposed child was con* 
scious was far less than the danger of which it Avas uncon* 
scious. 

Such is the state of orphanage. Because it is unprotected, 
it is therefore exposed to terrible evils. There are worse 
evils than the Nile, the crocodile, or starvation. 

Suppose the child had lived. Then, as a boy in the hands 
of a taskmaster or slave-driver, he would have become cal- 
lous, hard, and vicious, with every feeling of tenderness dried 
up. Nothing can replace a parent's tenderness. It is not 
for physical support merely that parents are given us, but 
for the formation of the heart. He wept now; but the 
fountain of the orphan's tears would have been withered and 
dried up, and instead of the tender man which he afterwards 
became, he would have become a hard-hearted slave. 

Let us suppose, again, the case of a girl orphaned. Then 
you have the danger infinitely multiplied. There would have 
been no one in all the land of Egypt to redress the wrongs 
done to a Hebrew maiden. There are men in this world to 
whom, putting religion out of the question even, the very fact 
of wanting protection is cause sufficient for them to render 
protection. There are men to whom defenselessness is its 
own all-sufficient plea : there are men in whose presence the 
woman and the orphan, just because they are unshielded by 
any care, are protected more than they could be by any 
laws. 

But remember, I pray you, that there is another spirit in 
the world — the si3irit of oppression, and even worse ; the 
spirit against which Jewish prophets rose to the height of a 
divine eloquence when they pleaded the cause of the father- 
less and the widow; that spirit which in our own day makes 
the daughter of the poor man less safe than the daughter of 
the rich ; that spirit of seduction, than which there is nothing 
more cowardly, more selfish, more damnable. For alas ! it 
is true that to say that a girl is unprotected, fatherless, and 
poor, is almost equivalent to saying that she will fall into sin. 

n. We pass on now to consider the orphan's education; 
and first I notice that it was a suggestion from another. 

The princess felt compassion, and so far was in the state 
of one who has warm feelings, but does not know how to do 
good. Brought up in a court, born to be waited on, nursed 
in luxury, ignorant of life and how the poor lived, those feel- 
ings might have remained helpless feelings. 



79^ The Orphanage of Moses. 

Then, in the providence of God, one stood by who offered 
a suggestion how she might benefit the child, " Shall I go and 
call a nurse ?" In other Avords, she suggested that it would 
be a princely and noble thing for Pharaoh's daughter to 
adopt and educate it. 

And now observe the value of such a suggestion : what 
we want is not feeling — emotions are common, feelings super-, 
abound. In the educated classes, feeling is extremely refined, 
but is much occupied with imaginary and unreal troubles; 
and the reason why, with such warm feelings so little good is 
done, is that we want the suggestion how to do it. 

Observe how differently the Bible treats this, from what 
the painter or the novelist would have done. A painter 
would have shown the majesty and beauty of the royal 
actor. A romance would have given a touching history of 
womanly sentiment. But the Bible, being a real book, says 
little of the emotion — merely mentions it — and passes on to 
the act to which the feeling was meant to lead. 

Brethren, we often make a mistake here ; we are proud of 
our emotions, of our refined feeling, of our quick sensibilities ; 
but remember, I pray you, feeling by itself is worthless — it is 
meant to lead to action, and if it fails to do this it is a danger 
rather than a blessing; for excited feeling that stops short 
of deeds is the precursor of callousness and hardness of heart. 
Your sensibility is well — but what has it done? 

We feel the orphan's claims, and now comes the question, 
how shall we do them good ? 

Let us observe that Moses was nursed by a Hebrew matron. 
She was one of his own grade. It would have been a capital 
error to have given him to an Egyptian nurse. Probably, 
the princess left to herself would have done so. But then 
he would have been weaned from his own race. In heart, 
sympathies, feelings, he would have been an Egyptian, ^ay, 
he would have been more exclusive; for the hardest are 
almost always those who have been raised above their for- 
mer position. The slave's hardest taskmaster is a negro. The 
one who is most exclusive in his sympathies is usually the 
raised merchant, or the one recently ennobled. 

This great thing is to emancipate the degraded through 
their own class. Only through their own class can they be 
effectually delivered ; the mere patronage of the great and 
rich injures character. 

So it was with Judaism; so it was with Christianity. 

The Redeemer was made of a woman — " born under the law 

-to redeem them that were under the law." He who came 

^ preach the Gospel to the DOor, was born of a poor woman. 



The Orphanage of Moses, 79Q 

But it was not only a Hebrew nurse to whom Moses was 
given, it was a mother — his own mother — who nursed him ; 
and from her he heard the story of his people's history. 
From her he learned to feel his country's wrongs to be his 
own. In the splendor of Pharaoh's court he never could 
forget that his mother was a slave, and that his father was 
working in brick and mortar, under cruel taskmasters. 

From the princess he gained the wisdom of Egypt — he 
was taught legislative science. From hardship he learned 
endurance and patience. Instruction ends in the school-room, 
but education ends only with life. A child is given to the 
universe to educate. 

Now let us see the results of this training on his intellect- 
ual and moral nature. 

1. Intellectually. We will only notice the spirit of inquiry 
and habit of observation. To ask "Why?" is the best 
Christian lesson for a child. Not the " why " which is the 
language of disobedience, but that " why " which demands 
for all phenomena a cause. It was this which led Moses on 
Mount Horeb to say, " I will turn aside and see this great 
sight, why the bush is not burned." So it was that Moses 
found out God. 

2, In the moral part of his character we note his hatred of 
injustice and cruelty; ever was he found ranged against 
oppression in whatever form it might appear. He stood 
ever on the side of right against might, whether it was to 
avenge the wrong done by the Egyptian to one of his 
Hebrew brethren, or to rescue the daughter of the priest of 
Midian from the oppressing shepherds. He became, too, a 
peacemaker. Thus we get a glimpse of the moral and 
mtellectual nature of the man who afterwards led Israel out 
of Egyptian bondage, and who, but for the education he had 
received, might have become as degraded as any of the 
nation he freed from slavery. 

At the present day, that child who might have become so 
degraded, stands second but to One in dignity and influence 
in the annals of the human race. Take, for one example, the 
Jewish sabbath. Thousands upon thousands of that nation, 
fond of gain and mammon as they proverbially are said to be, 
yet gave up their gains yesterday, and voluntarily surren- 
dered that one day in addition to this day which, by the law 
of the land, they are obliged to keep holy. And all this in 
obedience to the enactments of that orphan child, who three 
thousand years ago commanded the sabbath-day to be kept 
holy. In those days the Pharaohs of Egypt raised theif 
memorials in the enduring stone of the pyramids, which still 



8oo The Orphanage of Moses. 

remain almost untouehed by time. A princess of Egypt 
raised her memorial in a human spirit, and jnst so far as spirit 
is more enduring than stone, just so iar is the work of that 
princess more enduring than the work of the Pharaohs ; for 
when the day comes when those pyramids shall have crum- 
bled into nothingness and ruin, then shall the spirit of the 
laws of Moses still remain interwoven with the most hallowed 
of human institutions. So long as the spirit of Moses influ- 
ences this world, so long shall her work endure, the work of 
that royal-hearted lady who adopted this Hebrew orphan 
child. 

It now only remains for me to say a word on the claims 
of that institution for which I am to plead to-day — the Fe- 
male Orphan Asylum in this town. It was established in 
1823, and for years its funds flourished; lately they have 
fallen ofl" considerably, and that not in consequence of fault 
in the institution itself, but simply for this cause, that of 
those who took it up warmly once, many have been removed 
by death, and many have altered their place of residence, and 
also because many fresh calls and institutions have come for- 
ward, and thus have excluded this one. The consequence 
has been a sad falling ofl" of funds. Last year the expend- 
iture exceeded the receipts by one hundred pounds. 

Within the walls of that institution, now almost dilapida- 
ted and falling into decay, there are twenty-four female or- 
phan children, received from the age of six to sixteen ; not 
educated above their station, but educated simply to enable 
them "to do their duty in that state of life to which it has 
pleased God to call them." 

And now I earnestly desire to appeal to you for this object 
by the thoughts that have to-day been brought before you. 
Because they are children, I make an appeal to every moth- 
er's and woman's heart ; because they are females, young 
and unprotected, I make an appeal to the heart of every man 
who knows and feels the evils of society ; because they be- 
long to the lowest class, I make an appeal to all who have 
ever felt the infinite preciousness of the fact that the Saviour 
of this world was born a poor man's child. 

My beloved Christian brethren, let us not be content with 
feeling ; give, I pray you, as God has prospered you. 



Christianity and Hiridooism, 80 1 



XXIV. 
CHRISTIANITY AND HINDOOISM. 

A FRAGMENT OF AN ADVENT LECTURE. 

** Hear, O Israel : The Lord our God is one Lord : And thou shalt love 
the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy 
might." — Deut. vi. 4, 5, 

It is my intention, in giving the present course of lectures, 
to consider the advent of our Lord in connection with the 
cause of missionary labors. This connection is clear. His 
advent is the reign of God in the hearts of men ; and it is 
the aim of the missionary to set up that kingdom in men's 
hearts. There is also a more indirect connection between 
the two, because at this time the Church Missionary Society 
is celebrating its jubilee. It is now fifty years since the first 
mission was established at Sierra Leone, where, although 
they who composed that little band were swept off one 
after another by jungle fever — their groans unheard, them- 
selves unwept, and almost unhonored — yet there rose up 
other laborers after them ; and a firm footing was at length 
gained in that dark heathen land. 

On the Epiphany of next year we are to celebrate this ju- 
bilee in Brighton ; and it has seemed to me a good prepara- 
tion, that we should occupy, in thought, some field of mis- 
sionary exertion, and look at the difficulties which those 
have had to contend against, who have gone out in that 
work. There can be no doubt as to which shall be first cho- 
sen for our contemplation. India, with its vast territories 
and millions of people, comes first, both as being one of our 
own possessions, and by the heavy responsibilities attaching 
to us on account of it. 

We propose, therefore, to give some account of Hindoo 
superstition ; and here I would remark, there are three ways 
of looking at idolatry. 

I. There is the way of the mere scholar — that of men who 
read about it as the school-boy does, as a thing past — a cu- 
rious but worn-out system. This scholastic spii'it is the 
worst ; for it treats the question of religious worship as a 
piece of antiquarianism, of no vital consequence, but just cu- 
rious and amusing, 
2 c 



8o2 Christianity and Hindooism. 

II. There is the view taken by the religious partisan. 
There are some men who, thinking their religion right, de* 
termine therefore that every one who differs from tnem is 
wrong. They look with scorn and contempt on the religion 
of the Hindoo, and only think how they may force theirs 
upon him. In this spirit, the world can never be evangel- 
ized. A man may say to another, " I can not understand 
your believing such folly," but he will not convince him so 
of his error. It is only by entering into the mind and diffi- 
culties of the heathen that we can learn how to meet them 
and treat them effectually. 

III. There is the way of enlightened Christianity. In this 
spirit stood St. Paul on the hill at Athens. The beauty of 
Greek worship was nothing to him. To him it was still idol- 
atry, though it was enlightened ; but he was not hard 
enough not to be able to feel for them. He did not denounce 
it to them as damnable ; he showed them that they were 
feeling after God, but blindly, ignorantly, wrongly. " Whom 
ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you." 

The religion on which we are going to dwell to-day is 
one of the most subtle the world has ever received. It has 
stood the test of long ages and of great changes. The land 
has in turn submitted to the Macedonian, the Saracen, the 
Mohammedan conqueror; yet its civilization, and its w^ays 
of thinking, have remained always the same — in stagnation. 
We marvel how^ it has happened that their religion has re- 
mained sufficient for them. Let us look at it. 

I. We take, as the first branch of our subject, the Hin- 
doo conception of Divinity. We start with the assertion, 
that the god whom a man worships is but the reflection of 
himself. Tell us what a man's mind is, and we will tell you 
what his god is. Thus, amongst the Africans, the lowest 
and most degraded of mankind, forms of horror are rever- 
enced. The frightful, black, shapeless god, who can be 
frightened by the noise of a drum, is their object of worship. 

Our Scandinavian forefathers, whose delight was in the 
battle and the sea-fight, worshipped warlike gods, whose 
names still descend to us in the names given to the days of 
the week ; they expected after death the conqueror's feast in 
Walhalla, the flowing cup, and the victor's wreath. 

Look at Christianity itself We profess to worship the 
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we do not all worship 
the same God. The God of the child is not the God of the 
man. He is a beneficent being — an enlarged representation 
(to him) of his own father. The man whose mind is cast in 



Christianity and Hindooism, 80 



a fitern mould worships a God who sits above to administer 
justice and punishment. The man who shrinks from the 
idea of suffering worships a placable God, who combines the 
greatest possible amount of happiness for the race with the 
least possible amount of pain. 

[Now, consider the man who worships God as He appears 
in Jesus Christ.] 

There are two things distinctly marked in the Hindoo re« 
ligion : The love of physical repose ; and mental activity, 
restlessness, and subtlety. Theirs are ideas passing through 
trains of thought which leave our European minds marvel- 
ling in astonishment. 

Their first principle is that of God's unity. We are told 
by some that they have many gods, but all those who have 
deeply studied the subject agree in this — that they really 
have but one. This Hindoo deity is capable of two states — 
1. Inaction; 2. Action. The first state is that of a dream- 
less sleep, unconscious of its own existence ; all attributes 
have passed away — it is infinite nothing. We remark in men 
generally a desire iovrest ; in the Hindoo it is a desire mere- 
ly for indolence. Far deeper lodged in the human breast 
than the desire of honor or riches is seated the desire for 
rest : there are, doubtless, eager, earnest spirits, who m.ay 
scoi'n pleasure, but, nevertheless, they long for rest. Well 
and rightly has the Hindoo thrown this idea on God; but 
he has erred in the character of that repose. 

There are two kinds of rest: 1st. There is the rest de- 
sired by the world. 2d. There is the rest we find in Christ. 
The active mind, if out of its proper sphere, corrodes itself, 
and frets itself with plans and projects, finding no rest. The 
rest of Christ is not that of torpor, but harmony ; it is not 
refusing the struggle, but conquering m it ; not resting /rom 
duty, but finding rest in duty. 

The sabbaths of eternity have kept the Supreme Mind in 
infinite blessedness: on our restless, unqiiiet, throbbing 
hearts, God has been looking down, serene and calm. When 
chaos took lovely form and shape, then that rest began — 
not in the torpor of inaction, but in harmonious work. "My 
Father worketh hitherto." God works in all the smallest 
objects of creation, as well as in the largest. Even in mid- 
night stillness harmonious action is the law ; when every 
thing seems to slumber, all is really at work, for the spirit of 
life and the spirit of death are weaving and unweaving for- 
ever. 

We remark that to this god of Hindostan there rises no 



8o4 Christianity and Hindooism, 

temple throughout the length and breadth of the land. If 
you ask in astonishment, why is this? the Hindoo replies, 
" Pure, unmixed Deity is mind, and can not be confined to 
place ;" and well does he here teach us that God is a Spirit : 
but in his idea there is an exhibition of a god without quali- 
ties — a deity whom man may meditate on, and be absorbed 
jn, but not one to be loved or adored. 

Here is his first error ; here we can teach him something 
• — that God is a personal Being. 

Personality is made up of three attributes — consciousness, 
character, will. Without the union of these three, the idea 
is imperfect.- Personality the Hindoo Deity has none ; there- 
fore he can not be loved. 

Now when we look at God as revealed in Jesus Christ, 
He appears to us as having a mind like ours ; the ideas of 
number, of right and wrong, of sanctity, are to God precisely 
what they are to man. Conceive a mind without these, and 
it may be a high and lofty one, but there can be no com- 
munion with it. But when Christ speaks of love, of purity, 
of holiness, we feel that it is no abstraction we worship. 

H. We shall consider as the second branch of our subject 
the Hindoo theory of creation. 

We have spoken of the Hindoo Deity as capable of two 
states — that of perfection, or rest ; that of imperfection, or 
unrest. The Hindoo thinks that a time arrives when rest 
becomes action, and slumber becomes life ; and when, not 
willing to be alone, feeling solitary in his awaking, God 
wishes to impart life ; therefore He creates. 

Here again, we recognize a partial truth. In the Scrip- 
tures we never read of a time when God was alone. What 
is love but this, to find ourselves again in another? The 
" Word," we read, " was with God " before the world began. 
What the word is to the thought, that is Chi-ist to God. 
Creation was one expression of this — of His inmost feelings 
of beauty and loveliness ; whether it be the doleful sighings 
of the night-wind, or the flower that nestles in the grass, 
they tell alike of love. So has He also shown that love- on 
earth, in the outw^ard manifestation of the life of Christ — not 
only in the translated Word which we haA^e — beautiful as it 
is, but in the living Word. Read without this, history is a 
dark, tangled web, philosophy a disappointing thing. With- 
out this light society is imperfect, and the greatest men small 
and insignificant. From all these we turn to Christ ; here is 
that perfect Word to which our hearts echo, where no one 
syllable is wrong. 



Christianity and Hindooism. 805 

There are two Hindoo theories of creation : tlie gross 
view held by the many ; the refined one held by the philoso- 
pher and the Brahmin. Yet these two so mix and intermin- 
gle that it is difficult to give to European minds a clear no- 
tion of either of them separately. We will leave the 23opular 
view for another time, and we will try to deal now with the 
metaphysical and transcendental one. It is this — creation 
is illusion — the Deity awaking from sleep. The universe is 
God : God is the universe ; therefore He can not create. 
The Hindoo says, You, and T, and all men, are but gods — ■ 
ourselves in a wretched state of dream and illusion. We 
must try to explain this in part by our own records of times 
which we can all remember, when we have lain in a state 
between dreaming and waking — a phantasmagoric state, 
changing, combining, altering, like the kaleidoscope, so that 
we hardly knew realities from unrealities. " Such," says the 
Hindoo, " is your life — a delusion." I merely tell of this be- 
cause it colors all Hindoo existence ; the practical results we 
shall consider another time. For this the visionary con- 
templator of Brahm, and the Fakeer, sit beneath the tree, 
scarcely eating, speaking, or thinking ; hoping at length to 
become absorbed into that calm, dreamless, passive state 
which to them represents perfection. 

One truth w^e lind acknowledged in this theory is the un- 
reality of this world. Nobly has the Hindoo set forth the 
truth that the world is less real than the spirit. "What is 
your life ? it is even a vapor." Ask you what we are to live 
for ? The child, on whose young face the mother now gazes 
so tenderly, changes with years into the man with furrowed 
brow and silvered hair ; constitutions are formed and broken, 
friendships pass, love decays, who can say he possesses the 
same now that blessed him in his early life ? All passes 
whilst we look upon it. A most unreal, imaginative life. 
The spirit of life ever weaving — the spirit of death ever un- 
Aveaving ; all things putting on change. 

In conclusion, we observe here a great truth — the evil of 
self-consciousness. This self-consciousness is all evil. He 
who can dwell on this and that symptom of his moral nature 
is already diseased. We are too much haunted by ourselves ; 
we project the spectral shadow of ourselves on every thing 
around us. And then comes in the Gospel to rescue us from 
this selfishness. Redemption is this — to forget self in God. 
Does not the mother forget herself for a time in the child ; 
the loyal man in his strong feelings of devotion for his sover 
eign ? So does the Christian forget himself in the feeling that 
he has to live here for the performance of the will of God. 



So6 Rest. 

[And now contrast the Hindoo religion with the Chris- 
tian.] 

The Hindoo tells us the remedy for this unreality is to be 
found in the long unbroken sleep. The Christian tells us the 
remedy is this, that this broken dream of life shall end in a 
higher life. Life is but a sleep, a dream, and death is the 
real awakinsr. 



XXV. 

REST. 

*'Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give 
you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me ; for I am meek and 
lowly in heart : and ye shall find rest unto your souls." — Matt. xi. 28, 29. 

No one, perhaps, ever read these words of Christ without 
being struck with their singular adaptation to the necessities 
of our nature. We have read them again and again, and we 
have found them ever fresh, beautiful, and new. No man 
could ever read them without being conscious that they rea- 
lized the very deepest and inmost want of his being. We 
feel it is a convincing proof of His divine mission that He 
has thus struck the key-note of our nature, in offering us rest. 

Ancient systems were busy in the pursuit after happiness. 
Our modern systems of philosophy, science, ay, even of theol- 
ogy, occupy themselves with the same thought ; telling us 
alike that " happiness is our being's end and aim." But it is 
not so that the Redeemer teaches. His doctrine is in words 
such as these : " In the world ye shall have " — not happiness, 
but — " tribulation ; but be of good cheer, I have overcome 
the world ;" " In Me ye shall have peace." Not happiness 
— the outward well-being so called in the world — but the in- 
ward rest which cometh from above. And He alone who 
made this promise had a right to say, " Take my yoke upon 
you, and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart ; and 
ye shall find rest unto your souls." He had that rest in Him- 
self, and therefore could impart it ; but it is often offered by 
men who have it not themselves. There are some, high pro- 
fessors of religion too, who have never known this real rest, 
and who at fifty, sixty, seventy years of age, are as much 
slaves of the world as when they began, desiring still tlie 
honors, the riches, or the pleasures it has to give, and utterly 
nes^lectino; the life which is to come. 



Rest 807 

"Wheiv we turn to the history of Christ we find this repose 
characterizing His whole existence. For example, first, in 
the marriage-feast at Can a, in Galilee. He looked not upon 
that festivity with cynical asperity ; He frowned not upon 
the innocent joys of life : He made the wine to give enjoy- 
ment, and yet singularly contrasted was His human and His 
Divine joy. His mother came to Him full of consternation, 
and said, " They have no wine :" and the Redeemer, with 
calm self-possession, replied, " Woman, what have I to do 
with thee ? mine hour is not yet come." He felt not the de- 
ficiency w^hich He supplied. 

We pass from the marriage-feast to the scene of grief at 
Bethany, and still there we find that singular repose. Those 
words which we have seen to possess an almost magical 
charm in soothing the grief of mourners congregated round 
the cofiin of the dead — " I am the resurrection and the life : 
he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he 
live ; and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never 
die" — speak they not of repose? But in the requirements of 
these great matters many men are not found wanting ; it is 
when we come to the domesticities of their existence that 
we see fretting anxiety comes upon their soul. Therefore it 
is that we gladly turn to that home at Bethany where He 
had gone for quiet rest. Let us hear his words on the sub- 
ject of everyday cares : " Martha, Martha, thou art careful 
and troubled about many things ; but one thing is needful." 

AVe pass on from that to the state in which a man is tried 
the most : and if ever we can pardon words of restlessness 
and petulance, it is when friends are unfaithful. Yet even 
here there is perfect calmness. Looking steadfastly into the 
future. He says, "Do ye now believe? Behold, the hour 
Cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every 
man to his own, and shall leave Me alone : and yet I am not 
alone, because the Father is with Me." 

Once more, we turn to the Redeemer's prayers. They 
are characterized by a calmness singularly contrasted with 
the vehemence which we sometimes see endeavoring to lash 
itself into a greater fervor of devotion. The model prayer 
has no eloquence in it ; it is calm, simple, full of repose. 

We find this again in the l7th chapter of St. John. If a 
man feels himself artificial and worldly, if a man feels rest- 
less, we would recommend him to take up that chapter as 
his best cure. For at least one moment, as he read it, he 
would feel in his soul calmness and repose ; it would seem 
almost as if he were listening to the grave and solemn words 
of a divine soliloquy. Tliis was the mind of Him who gave 



8o8 Rest 

this gracious promise, " Come unto Me all ye that labor and 
are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." We repeat these 
words as a matter of course ; but I ask. Has that repose been 
found ? — has this peace come to us ? for it is not by merely 
repeating them over and over again that we can enter into 
the deep rest of Christ. 

Our subject this day will be to consider, in the first place, 
the false systems of rest which the world holds out, and to 
contrast them with the true rest of Christ. The first false 
system proposed is the expectation of repose in the grave. 
When the spirit has parted from the body after long- 
protracted suflferings, we often hear it said that the release 
was a happy one ; that there is a repose in the grave ; that 
there " the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are 
at rest." Nay, at times, perhaps, we find ourselves hazard- 
ing a wish that our own particular current of existence had 
come to that point, when it should mingle with the vast 
ocean of eternity. 

There is in all this a kind of spurious Pantheism, a sort of 
feeling that God is alike in every heart, that every man is 
to be blessed at last, that death is but a mere transition to a 
blessed sleep, that in the grave there is nothing but quiet, 
and that there is no misery beyond it. And yet one of the 
deepest thinkers of our nation suggests that there r)iay be 
dreams even in the sleep of death. There is an illusion 
often in the way in which we think of death. The counte- 
nance, after the spirit has departed, is so strangely calm 
and meek that it produces the feeling of repose within us, 
and we transfer our feelings to that of the departed spirit, 
and we fancy that body no longer convulsed with pain, those 
features so serene and full of peace, do but figure the rest 
which the spirit is enjoying ; and yet, perhaps that soul, a 
few hours ago, was full of worldliness, full of pride, full of 
self-love. Think you that now that spirit is at rest — that it 
has entered into the rest of Christ.? The repose that be- 
longs to the grave is not even a rest of the atoms composing 
our material form. 

There is another fallacious system of rest which would 
place it in the absence of outward trial. This is the world's 
peace. The world's peace ever consists in plans for the re- 
moval of outward trials. There lies at the bottom of all 
false systems of peace, the fallacy that if we can but produce 
a perfect set of circumstances, then we shall have the perfect 
man ; if we remove temptation, we shall have a holy being: 
and so the world's rest comes to this — merely happiness and 
outward enjoyment. Ay, my Christian brethren, we carry 



Rest, Bog 

these anticipations beyond the grave, and we think the 
heaven of God is but like the Mohammedan paradise — a 
place in which the rain shall beat on us no longer, and the 
sun pour his burning rays upon us no more. Very often it 
is only a little less sensual, but quite as ignoble as that fabled 
by Mohammed. 

The Redeemer throws all this aside at once as mere illu- 
sion. He teaches just the contraiy. He says, " Not as the 
world giveth, give I unto you." The world proposes a rest 
by the removal of a burden. The Redeemer gives rest by 
giving us the spirit and power to bear the burden. "Take 
my yoke upon you, and learn of Me, and ye shall find rest 
unto your souls." Christ does not promise a rest of inaction, 
neither that the thorns shall be converted into roses, nor that 
the trials of life shall be removed. 

To the man who takes this yoke up in Christ's spirit, 
labor becomes blessedness — rest of soul and rest of body. 

It matters not in what circumstances men are, whether 
high or low, never shall the rest of Christ be found in ease 
and self-gratification ; never, throughout eternity, will there 
be rest found in a life of freedom from duty : the paradise 
of the sluggard, where there is no exertion ; the heaven of 
the coward, where there is no difiiculty to be opposed, is not 
the rest of Christ. " Take my yoke upon you." Nay, more 
— if God could give us a heaven like that, it would be but 
misery ; there can be no joy in indolent inaction. The curse 
on this world is labor ; but to him who labors earnestly and 
truly it turns to blessedness. It is a curse only to him who 
tries to escape from the work allotted to him, who endeavors 
to make a compromise with duty. To him who takes Christ's 
yoke, not in a spirit of selfish ease and acquiescence in evil, 
but in strife and stern battle with it the rest of Christ 
streams in upon his soul. 

Many of us are drifting away from our moorings ; we are 
quitting the old forms of thought, and faith, and life, and are 
seeking for something other than what satisfied the last gen- 
eration : and this in a vain search for rest. 

Many are the different systems of repose ofi*ered to us, 
and foremost is that proposed by" the Church of Rome. Let 
us do her the justice, at all events, to allow that she follows 
the Redeemer in this — it is not happiness she promises, she 
promises rest. The great strength of Romanism lies in this, 
that she professes to answer and satisfy the deep want of 
human nature for rest. She speaks of an infallibility on 
which she would persuade men, weary of the strain of doubt, 
to rest. It is not to the tales of miracles, and of the per* 



8io Rest 

gonal interference of God Himself; but to the promise of an 
impossibility of error to those within her pale, that she owes 
her influence. And we say, better far to face doubt and 
perplexity manfully ; to bear any yoke of Christ's than be 
content with the rest of a Church's infallibility. 

There is another error among many Dissenters ; in a dif 
ferent form we find the same promise held out. One says, 
that if we will but rely on God's promise of election our 
soul must find repose. Another system tells us that the 
penalty has fallen upon Christ, and that if we believe we 
shall no longer suflTer. ISTarrowing their doctrines into one, 
as if all the want of the soul was to escape from punishment, 
they place before us this doctrine, and say, believe that, and 
your soul shall find repose. 

We have seen earnest men anxiously turning from view 
to view, and yet finding their souls as far from rest as ever. 
They remind us of the struggles of a man in fever, finding no 
rest, tossing from side to side, in vain seeking a cool spot on 
his pillow, and forgetting that the fever is within himself 
And so it is with us ; the unrest is within us : we foolishly 
expect to find that tranquillity in outward doctrine which 
alone can come from the calmness of the soul. 

We will not deny that there is a hind of rest to be found 
in doctrine for a time : for instance, when a man, whose only 
idea of evil is its penalty, has received the consoling doctrine 
that there is no suffering for him to bear: but the unrest 
comes again. Doubtless, the Pharisees and Sadducees, when 
they went to the baptism of John, found something of repose 
there ; but think you that they went back to their daily life 
with the rest of Christ ? We expect some outward change 
will do that which nothing but the inward life can do — it is 
the life of Christ within the soul which alone can give repose. 
There have been men in the Church of Rome and in the 
ranks of dissent who have indeed erred grievously, but yet 
have lived a life of godliness. There have been men in the 
true Church — as Judas, who was a member of the true 
Church — who yet, step by step, have formed in themselves 
the devil's nature : the rest of Christ pertains not to any one 
outward communion. 

Before we go farther, let us understand what is meant by 
this rest ; let us look to those symbols about us in the world 
of nature by which it is suggested. It is not the lake locked 
in ice that suggests repose, but the river moving on calmly 
and rapidly in silent majesty and strength. It is not the 
cattle lying in the sun, but the eagle cleaving the air with 
fixed pinions, that gives you the idea of repose combined with 



Rest. 8ii 

strength and motion. In creation, the rest of God is exhibit- 
ed as a sense of power which nothing wearies. When chaos 
burst into harmony, so to speak, God had rest. 

There are two deep principles in nature in apparent con- 
tradiction — one, the aspiration after perfection ; the other, 
the longing after repose. In the harmony of these lies the 
rest of the soul of man. There have been times when we 
have experienced this. Then the winds have been hushed, 
and the throb and the tumult of the passions have been blot- 
ted out of our bosoms. That was a moment when we were 
in harmony with all around, reconciled to ourselves and to 
our God ; when we sympathized with all that was pure, all 
that was beautiful, all that was lovely. 

This was not stagnation, it was fullness of life — life in its 
most expanded form, such as nature witnessed in her first 
hour. This is life in that form of benevolence which expands 
into the mind of Christ. And when this is working in the 
soul, it is marvellous how it distills into a man's words and 
countenance. Strange and magical is the power of that col- 
lect wherein we pray to God, " Who alone can order the un- 
ruly wills and affections of sinful men, to grant unto His 
people that they may love the thing which He commands, 
and desire that which He promises; that so among the 
sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may 
surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found." 
There is a wondrous melody in that rhythm ; the words are 
the echoes of the thought. The mind of the man who wrote 
them was in repose — all is ringing of rest. We do not won- 
der when Moses came down from the mount on which he 
had been bowing in adoration before the harmony of God, 
that his face was shining with a brightness too dazzling to 
look upon. 

Our blessed Redeemer refers this rest to meekness and low- 
liness. There are three causes in men producing unrest : 1. 
Suspicion of God. 2. Inward discord. 3. Dissatisfaction 
w4th outward circumstances. For all these meekness is the 
cure. For the difiiculty of understanding this world, the 
secret is in meekness. There is no mystery in God's deal- 
ings to the meek man, for " the secret of the Lord is with 
them that fear Him, and He will show them His covenant ;" 
there is no dread of God's judgments when., our souls are 
meek. 

The second cause of unrest is inward discord. We are 
going on in our selfishness. We stand, as Balaam stood, 
against the angel of the Lord, pressing on whilst the angel 
of love stands against us. Just as the dove struggling 



8i2 Rest 

against the storm, feeble and tired, is almost spent, unti\ 
gradually, as if by inspiration, it has descended to the lower 
atmosphere, and so avoided the buffeting of the tempests 
above, and is then borne on by the wind of heaven in entire 
repose : like that is the rest of the soul. While we are un- 
reconciled, the love of God stands against us, and, by His 
will, as long as man refuses to take up that yoke of His, he 
is full of discord; he is like the dove struggling with the 
elements aloft, as yet unconscious of the calm there is below\ 
And you must make no compromise in taking up the burden 
of the Lord. 

Lastly, unrest comes. from dissatisfaction with outward 
circumstances. Part, perhaps the greater part, of our misery 
here comes from over-estimation of ourselves. We are slaves 
to vanity and pride. We think we are not in the right sta- 
tion ; our genius has been misunderstood ; we have been 
slighted, we have been passed by, we have not been reward- 
ed as we ought to have been. So long as we have this false 
opinion of ourselves, it is impossible for us to realize true 
rest. 

Sinners, in a world of love, encircling you round on every 
side, with blessings infinite upon infinite, and that again mul- 
tiplied by infinity : God loves you : God fills you wdth en- 
joyment ! Unjustly, unfairly treated in this world of love ! 
Once let a man know for himself what God is, and then in 
that he will find peace. It will be the dawm of an everlast- 
ing day of calmness and serenity. I speak to some who 
have felt the darkness, the clouds, and the dreariness of life, 
whose affections have been blighted, who feel a discord and 
confusion in their being. To some to whom the world, 
lovely though it be, is such that they are obliged to say, "I 
see, I do not feel, how beautiful it is." 

Brother men, there is rest in Christ, because He is lOve ; 
because His are the everlasting verities of humanity. God 
does not cease to be the God of love because men are low, 
sad, and desponding. In the performance of duty, in meek- 
ness, in trust in God, is our rest — our only rest. It is not in 
understanding a set of doctrines ; not in an outward compre- 
hension of the " scheme of salvation," that rest and peace are 
to be found, but in taking up, in all lowliness and meekness, 
the yoke of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

"For thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth 
eternity, whose name is Holy ; I dwell in the high and holy 
place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, 
to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of 
the contrite ones." 



The Humane Society. 8 1 3 



XXVI. 
THE HUMANE SOCIETY. 

A SERMON PREACHED ON ITS BEHALF. 

*' While he yet spake, there came from the ruler of the synagogue's house 
certain which said, Thy daughter is dead ; why troublest thou the Master 
any further? As soon as Jesus heard the word that was spoken, he saith 
unto the ruler of the synagogue, Be not afraid, only believe. And he suffered 
no man to follow him, save Peter, and James, and John the bi-other of James. 
And he cometh to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, and seeth the 
tumult, and them that wept and wailed greatly. And when he was come in, 
he saith unto them, Why make ye this ado, and weep ? the damsel is not 
dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn. But when he had put 
them all out, he taketh the father and the mother of the damsel, and them that 
were with him, and entereth in where the damsel was lying. And he took 
the damsel by the hand, and said unto her, Talitha cumi ; which is, being 
interpreted. Damsel, (I say unto thee,) arise. And straightway the damsel 
arose, and walked ; for she was of the age of twelve years. And they Avere 
astonished with a great astonishment. And he charged them straitly that 
no man should know it ; and commanded that something should be given her 
to eat." — Mark v. 35-43. 

I PLEAD to-day for a society whose cause has not been ad- 
vocated in this chapel for many years. It is now exactly ten 
years since a collection was made in Trinity Chapel for the 
Humane Society. 

Its general objects, as every body knows, are the preser- 
vation of the lile of drowning persons, by precautions pre- 
viously taken, and by subsequent remedies. But this vague 
statement being insullicient to awaken the interest which the 
society deserves, I propose to consider it in its details, and 
to view these — as in the pulpit we are bound to do — from 
the peculiar Christian point of view. 

It is remarkable that there is & Scripture passage which, 
point by point, offers a parallel to the work of this Society, 
and a special sanction and a precedent, both for its peculiar 
work and the spirit in which it is to be done. I shall con- 
sider — 

L This particular form of the Redeemer's work. 
II. The spirit of the Redeemer's work. 

I. We find among the many forms of His work — 
1. Restoration from a special form of death. I can not 
class this case ^Wth that of Lazarus, 



8i4 T/ie Hiimaiie Society. 

The narrative seems to distinguish this from the other mir. 
acle. Christ says, " She is not dead, but sleepeth." Hence 
this particular case was one of restoration from apparent 
death. The other case was that of restoration from real 
death. 

Here, then, is our first point of resemblance. 

Before this society was formed, persons apparently suffo- 
cated w^ere left to perish. Myriads, doubtless, have died who 
might have been saved. But the idea of restoration was as 
far from them as from the friends of Jairus. They would 
have laughed the proposer " to scorn." But, Christlike, this 
society came into the world with a strange message — re- 
vealed by science, but vitalized by love — a Christlike mes- 
sage : " Be not afraid : he is not dead, but sleepeth." 

Now the sphere of the society's operations is thus defined : 
" To preserve from premature death persons apparently 
dead from either drowning, hanging, lightning, cold, heat, 
noxious vapors, apoplexy, or intoxication." They are, con- 
sequently, large, taking cognizance not merely of cases of 
drowning only, but all of the same generic character — sus- 
pended animation, apparent death, asphyxia. 

[Causes — foul air, in drains and brewers' vats, accidental 
hanging, mines, cellars, wells.] 

In England their causes are more peculiarly extensive, be- 
cause of our sea-girt shores, and because of the variable 
climate, which to-day leaves the ice firm and to-morrow has 
made it rotten and unsafe. 

2. Here was the recognition of the value of life. The force 
of the whole petition lay in one single consideration — " she 
shall live." 

It has been often said that Christianity has enhanced the 
value of life, and our charitable societies are alleged in evi- 
dence ; our hospitals ; the increased average of human life, 
which has been the result of sanitary regulations and im- 
provements in medical treatment. But this statement needs 
fiome qualification. 

The value attached to life by the ancient Egyptian was 
quite as great as that attributed to it by the modern English- 
man. When Abraham went into Egypt he found a people 
whose feeling of the sacredness of life was so great that they 
saw God wherever life was ; and venerated the bull, and the 
fish, and the crocodile. To slay one of them was like mur- 
der. 

And again : it could not be said that we owe to Christian- 
ity the recognition of the honor due to one who saves Ufa 



The Humane Society, 815 

The most honorable of crowns was that presented to one who 
had saved the life of a Roman citizen. 

Nay more: instead of peculiarly exalting the value of life, 
there is a sense in which Christianity depreciates it. " If a 
man hate not his own life he can not be my disciple." The 
Son of Man came to be a sacrifice : and it is the peculiar dig- 
nity of the Christian that he has a life to give. 

Therefore we must distinguish. 

It is not mere life on which Christianity has shed a richer 
value. It is by ennobling the purpose to which life is to be 
dedicated that it has made life more precious. A crowded 
metropolis, looked at merely as a mass of living beings, is no 
more dignified, and far more disgusting, than an ant-hill with 
its innumerable creeping lives. Looked on as a place in 
which each individual is a temple of the Holy Ghost, and 
every pang and joy of whom has in it something of infinitude, 
it becomes almost priceless in its value. 

And again: Christianity diff*ers from heathenism in this, 
that it has declared the dignity of the life of man — not mere- 
ly that of certain classes. It has not " saved citizens," but 
saved men. 

[Consider the worth of a single soul.] 

Hence this is appropriately called the Humane Society, 
that word originally "meaning human. It is no Brahminical 
association, abstaining from shedding animal blood and living 
on no animal food, but it recognizes the worth of a life in 
which God moves, and which Christ has redeemed. 

It is human life, not animal, that it cares for. The life of 
man as man, not of some peculiar class of men. 

3. We consider the Saviour's direction respecting the 
means of effecting complete recovery. He " commanded that 
something should be given her to eat." 

Observe His reverential submission to the laws of nature. 
He did not suspend those laws. It did not seem to Him that 
where law was, God was not; or that the proof of God's 
agency was to be found only in the abrogation of law. He 
recognized the sanctity of those laws which make certain 
remedies and certain treatment indispensable to health. 

[Sanitary regulations are as religious as a miracle.] 

And in doing this He furnished a precedent singularly close 
for the operations of this societj^ It is one great part of the 
object of its existence to spread a knowledge of the right 
methods of treatment in case of suspended animation. It 
has compiled and published rules for the treatment of the 



8i6 The Humane Society. 

drowned, the apparently suffocated, and those struck by sud- 
den apoplexy. 

And consider the indirect results of this, as well as the 
direct. 

Such cases occur unexpectedly. No medical aid is near. 
Friends are alarmed. Presence of mind is lost. The vulgar 
means resorted to from superstition and ignorance are almost 
incredible. But gradually the knowledge is spread through 
the country of what to do in cases of emergency. Many 
here would be prepared to act if a need arose, I have been 
present at such a case, and have seen life saved by arresting 
the rough treatment of ignorance acting traditionally. But 
in that and most cases, the knowledge had been gained from 
the publications of this society. 

An immense step is gained by the systematic direction of 
attention to these matters. Every one ought to know what 
to do on a sudden emergency, a case of strangulation, of suf- 
focation, or of apoplexy ; and yet, this forming no definite 
part of the general plan of education, there are comparative- 
ly few who have the least idea what should be done before 
medical aid can be obtained. Probably thousands would be 
helpless as a child, and human life would be sacrificed. 

II. We consider the spirit of the Redeemer's work. 

1. It was love. 

It was not reward — not even the reward of applause — 
which was the spring of beneficence in the Son of Man. He 
desired that it should be unknown. He did good because it 
was good. He relieved because it was the expression of His 
own exuberant loving-kindness. 

2. It was a spirit of retiring modesty. 

He did not wish that it should be known. But his disciples 
have made it known to the world. 

Now observe, first, the evidence here afforded of His real 
humanity. Why did Christ wish to conceal, and the apostles 
wish to publish abroad his miracles ? Take the simple view, 
and all is plain. Christ, the man., with unaffected modesty, 
shrank from publicity and applause. The apostles, with 
genuine human admiration, record the deed. But seek for 
some deeper and more mysterious reason, and at once the 
whole becomes a pantomime, an unreal transaction acted on 
this world's stage for effect, as though we should say that He 
was wishing to have it known, but for certain reasons He 
made as if He wished it to be concealed. Here, as usual, the 
simple is the sublime and true. 

Observe, however, secondly : That publication by the apos 



The Humane Society. 8 1 7 

ties sanctions and explains another part of this society's 
operations. Its office is to observe, to record, and to reward 
acts of self-devotion. Certain scales of reward are given to 
one who risks his life to save life, to the surgeon whose skill 
restores life, to the publican who opens his house to receive 
the apparently dead body. And every year lists of names 
are published of those who have been thus distinguished by 
their humanity. The eyes of the society are over all Eng- 
land, and no heroic act can pass unnoticed or unhonored by 
them. 

Now distinctly understand on what principle this is done. 
It is an apostolic office. It is precisely the principle on which 
the apostles were appointed by God to record the acts and 
life of Christ. Was this for Christ's sake ? Nay, it was for 
the world's good. That sacrifice of Christ recorded, pro- 
nounced Divine, has been the spring and life of innumerable 
sacrifices and unknown self-devotion. 

And so the rewards given by this society are not given as 
recompense. Think you that a medal can pay self-devo- 
tion? or a few pounds liquidate the debt due to generosity? 
or even, that the thought of the reward would lead a man to 
plunge into the water to save life, who would not have 
plunged in without any hope of reward ? No ! But it is 
good for the world to hear of what is generous and good. 
It is good to appropriate rewards to such acts, in order to 
set the standard. It is right that, in a country where enor- 
mous subscriptions are collected, and monuments are erected 
to men who have made fortunes by speculation, there should 
be some visible, tangible recognition of the worth and value 
of more generous deeds. 

The medal over the fire-place of the poor fisherman is to 
him a title ; and, truer than most titles, it tells what has been 
done. It descends an heirloom to the family, saying to the 
children. Be brave, self-sacrificing, as your father was. 

3. It was a spirit of perseverance. 

They laughed Him to scorn, yet He persisted. Slow, calm 
perseverance amidst ridicule. 

In the progress of this society we find, again, a parallel. 
When the idea of resuscitation was first promulgated, it was 
met with incredulity and ridicule. Even in 1773, when Dr. 
Hawes laid the first foundation of the Humane Society, it 
was with difficulty he could overcome the prejudice which 
existed against the idea, and he had to bear the whole cost 
of demonstrating the practicability of his theory. For one 
whole year he paid all the rewards and expenses himself, and 
then, attracted by the self sacrificing ardor with Avhich he 



8i8 Three Times in a Natioiis History, 

had given himself up to the idea of rescuing human life, 
thirty -two gentlemen, his own and Dr. Cogan's friends, 
united together in furtherance of this benevolent design, and 
thus laid the foundation of the Humane Society. 

Here note the attractive power of self-denying work ; the 
Redeemer's life and death has been the living power of the 
iForld's work, of the world's life. 



XXVII. 
THREE TIMES IN A IS^ATION'S HISTORY. 

*' And when he v/as come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, say- 
ing. If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which 
belong unto thy peace ! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days 
shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and 
compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even 
with the gi-ound, and thy children within thee ; and they shall not leave in 
thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy vis- 
itation." — Luke xix. 41-44. 

The event of which we have just read took place in the 
last year of our Redeemer's life. For nearly four years He 
had been preaching the Gospel. His pilgrim life was draw- 
ing to a close ; yet no one looking at the outward circum- 
stances of that journey would have imagined that He was 
on His way to die. It was far more like a triumphal journey, 
for a rejoicing multitude heralded His way to Jerusalem with 
shouts — "Hosanna to the Son of David !" He trod, too, a 
road green with palm branches, and strewn with their gar- 
ments ; and yet in the midst of all this joy, as if rejoi'jing 
were not for Him, the Man of Sorrows paused to weep. 

There is something significant and characteristic in that 
peculiar tone of melancholy which pervaded the Redeemer's 
intercourse with man. We read of but one occasion on 
which He rejoiced, and then only in spirit. He did not 
shrink from occasions of human joy, for He attended the 
marriage-feast; yet even there the solemn remark, appa- 
rently out of place, was heard — " Mine hour is not yet come." 
There was in Him that peculiarity Avhich we find more or 
less in all the purest, most thoughtful minds — a shade of 
melancholy ; much of sadness ; though none of austerity. 
For, after all, when we come to look at this life of ours, what- 
ever may be its outward appearance, in the depths of it there 
is great seriousness; the externalities of it may seem to be 



Three Times in a Nations History. 819 

joy and brightness, hut in the deep beneath there is a strange, 
stern aspect. It may be that the human race is on its way 
to good, but the victory hitherto gained is so small that we 
can scarcely rejoice over it. It may be that human nature 
is progressing, but that progress has been but slowly mak- 
ing, through years and centuries of blood. And therefore 
contemplating all this, and penetrating beyond the time of 
the present joy, the Redeemer wept, not for Himself, but for 
that devoted city. 

He was then on the Mount of Olives ; beneath Him there 
lay the metropolis of Judea, with the Temple in full sight ; 
the towers and the walls of Jerusalem flashing back the 
brightness of an Oriental sky. The Redeemer knew that she 
was doomed, and therefore with tears He pronounced her 
coming fate : " The days shall come that thine enemies shall 
cast a trench about thee, and shall not leave in thee one 
stone upon another." These words, which rang the funeral 
knell of Jerusalem, tell out in our ears this day a solemn les- 
son ; they tell us that in the history of nations, and also, it 
may be, in the personal history of individuals, there are three 
times — a time of grace, a time of blindness, and a time of 
judgment. 

This then, is our subject — the three times in a nation's 
history. When the Redeemer spake, it was for Jerusalem 
the time of blindness ; the time of grace was past ; that of 
judgment was to come. 

We tfkeithese three in order: first, the time of grace. 
We find it expressed here in three diiferent modes: first, 
" in this thy day ;" then, " the things which belong to thy 
peace ;" and thirdly, " the time of thy visitation." And from 
this we understand the meaning of a time of grace ; it was 
Jerusalem's time of opportunity. The time in which the Re- 
deemer appeared was that in which faith was almost worn 
out. He found men with their faces turned backward to the 
past, instead of forward to the future. They were as chil- 
dren clinging to the garments of a relation they have lost ; 
life there was not, faith there was not — only the garments 
of a past belief. He found them groaning under the domin- 
ion of Rome ; rising up against it, and thinking it their 
worst evil. 

The coldest hour of ali the night is that which immediately 
precedes the dawn, and in that darkest hour of Jerusalem's 
night her light beamed forth ; her wisest and greatest came 
in the midsc of her, almost unknown, born under the law, to 
emancipate those who were groaning under the law. His life, 
the day of His preaching, was Jerusalem's time of grace. 



820 Three Times in a Nations History. 

During that time the Redeemer spake the things which be 
longed to her peace: tliose things were few and simple. He 
found her people mourning under political degradation. He 
told them that political degradation does not degrade the 
man ; the only thing that can degrade a man is slavery to 
sin. He told men who were looking merely to the past, no 
longer to look thither and say that Abraham was their father, 
for that God could raise up out of those stones children to 
Abraham, and a greater than Abraham was there. He told 
them also not to look for some future deliverer, for deliver- 
ance was already come. They asked Him when the king- 
dom of God should come ; He told them they were not to 
cry, Lo here ! or, lo there ! for the kingdom of God was with- 
in ; that they were to begin the kingdom of God now, by 
each man becoming individually more holy, that if each man 
so reformed his own soul, the reformation of the kingdom 
would soon spread around them. They came to Him com- 
plaining of the Roman tribute; He asked for a piece of 
money, and said, " Render unto Caesar the things that be 
Caesar's, and to God the things that be God's ;" — plainly tell- 
ing them that the bondage from which men were to be de- 
livered was not an earthly, but a spiritual bondage. He 
drew the distinction sharply between happiness and blessed- 
ness — the two things are opposite, although not necessarily 
contrary. He told them, " Blessed are the meek ! Blessed 
are the poor in spirit !" The mourning man, and the poor 
man, and the persecuted man — these were not happy, if hap- 
piness consists in the gratification of all our desires ; but they 
were blessed beyond all earthly blessedness, for happiness is 
but the contentment of desire, while blessedness is the satis- 
faction of those aspirations which have God alone for their 
end and aim. 

All these things were rejected by the nation. They were 
rejected first by the priests. They knew not that the mind 
of the age in which they lived was in advance of the tra- 
ditional Judaism, and, therefore, they looked upon the Re- 
deemer as an irreverent, ungodly man, a sabbath-breaker. 
He was rejected by the rulers, who did not understand that 
in righteousness alone are governments to subsist, and, there 
fore, when He demanded of them justice, mercy, truth, they 
looked upon Him as a revolutionizer. He was rejected like- 
wise by the people — that people ever ready to listen to any 
demagogue promising them earthly grandeur. They who on 
this occasion called out, " Hosanna to the Son of David," and 
were content to do so, so long as they believed He intended 
to lead them to personal comfort and enjoyment, afterwards 



Three Times in a Natioiis History. 821 

cried out, " Crucify Him ! crucify Hini !" " His blood be on 
us, and on our children ;" so that His rejection was the act 
of the whole nation. Now, respecting this day of grace we 
have two remarks to make. 

First : in this advent of the Redeemer there was nothing 
outwardly remarkable to the men of that day. It was al- 
most nothing. Of all the historians of that period, few in- 
deed are found to mention it. This is a thing which we at 
this day can scarcely understand ; for to us the blessed advent 
of our Lord is the brightest page in the world's history : but 
to them it was far otherwise. Remember, for one moment, 
what the advent of our Lord was to all outward appearance. 
He seemed, let it be said reverently, to the rulers of those 
days, a fanatical freethinker. They heard of His miracles, 
but they appeared nothing remarkable to them ; there was 
nothing there on which to fasten their attention. They heard 
that some of the populace had been led away, and now and 
then, it may be, some of His words reached their ears, but to 
them they were hard to be understood — full of mystery, or 
else they roused every evil passion in their hearts, so stern 
and uncompromising was the morality they taught. They 
put aside these words in that brief period, and the day of 
grace passed. 

And just such as this is God's visitation to us. Generally, 
the day of God's visitation is not a day very remarkable out- 
wardly. Bereavements, sorrows — no doubt, in these God 
speaks ; but there are other occasions far more quiet and un- 
obtrusive, but which are yet plainly days of grace. A scruple 
which others do not see, a doubt coming into the mind re- 
specting some views held sacred by the popular creed, a sense 
of heart-loneliness and solitariness, a feeling of awful misgiving 
when the future lies open before us, the dread feeling of an 
eternal godlessness, for men who are living godless lives now 
— these silent moments unmarked, these are the moments in 
which the Eternal is speaking to our souls. 

Once more : that day of Jerusalem's visitation— hsr day 
of grace — was short. It was narrowed up into the short 
space of three years and a half After that, God stj^l plead- 
ed with individuals ; but the national cause, as a cause, wa? 
gone. Jerusalem's doom was sealed when He pronounced 
those words. Again, there is a lesson, a principle for us : God's 
day of visitation is frequently short. A few actions often 
decide the destiny of individuals, because they give a desti- 
nation and form to habits ; they settle the tone and form of 
the mind from which there will be in this life no alteration. 
So it is in the earliest history of our species. In those mys- 



82 2 Three Times in a Nafiojts History, 

terious chapters at the commencement of the book of GeDe* 
sis, we are told that it was one act which sealed the destiny 
of Adam and of all the human race. What was it but a very 
few actions, done in a very short time, that settled the destiny 
of those nations through which the children of Israel passed 
on their way to Canaan ? The question for them was simply, 
whether they would show Israel mercy or not ; this was all. 

Once more: we see it again in the case of Saul. One cir* 
cumstance, at the most, two, marked out his destiny. Then 
came those solemn words, " The strength of Israel can not lie 
nor repent. The Lord hath rent the kingdom from thee this 
day." From that hour his course was downward, his day 
of grace was past. 

Brethren, the truth is plain. The day of visitation is aw- 
fully short. We say not that God Jiever pleads a long time, 
but we say this, that sometimes God speaks to a nation or to 
a man but once. If not heard then, His voice is heard no 
more. 

We pass on now to consider Israel's day of blindness. Ju- 
dicial blindness is of a twofold character. It may be pro- 
duced by removing the light, or by incapacitating the eye to 
receive that light. Sometimes men do not see because there 
is no light for them to see ; and this was what was done to 
Israel — the Saviour was taken away from her. The voice of 
the apostles declared this truth : " It was necessary that the 
word should first have been spoken to you ; but seeing ye 
put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlast- 
ing life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles." 

There is a way of blindness by hardening the heart. Let 
us not conceal this truth from ourselves. God blinds the eye, 
but it is in the appointed course of His providential dealings. 
If a man vnll not see, the law is he shall not see ; if he will 
not do what is right when he knows the right, then right 
shall become to him wrong, and wrong shall seem to be right. 
We read that God hardened Pharaoh's heart ; that He blind- 
ed Israel. It is impossible to look at these cases of blindness 
without perceiving in them something of Divine action. 
Even at^the moment when the Romans were at their gates, 
Jerusalem still dreamed of security; and when the battering- 
ram was at the tower of Antonia, the priests were celebrating, 
in fancied safety, their daily sacrifices. From the moment 
when our Master spake, there was deep stillness over her 
until her destruction ; like the strange and unnatural stillness 
before the thunder-storm, when every breath seems hushed, 
and every leaf may be almost heard moving in the motion- 
less air ; and all this calm and stillness is but the prelude to 



Three Times in a Nation s History, 823 

the moment when the east and west are lighted up with the 
red flashes, and the whole creation seems to reel. Such was 
the blindness of that nation which would not know the day 
of her visitation. 

We pass on now to consider, lastly, her day of judgment. 
Her beautiful morning was clouded, her sun had gone down 
in gloom, and she was left in darkness. The account of the 
siege is one of the darkest passages in Roman history. In 
the providence of God, the history of that belongs, not to a 
Christian, but to a Jew. We all know the account that he 
has given us of the eleven hundred thousand who perished 
in that siege, of the thousands crucified along the sea-shore. 
We have all heard of the two factions that divided the city, 
of the intense hatred that made the cruelty of Jew towards 
Jew more terrible than even the vengeance of the Romans. 
This was the destruction of Jerusalem — the day of her ruin. 

And now, brethren, let us observe, this judgment came in 
the way of natural consequences. We make a great mistake 
respecting judgments. God's judgments are not arbitrary, 
but the results of natural laws. The historians tell us that 
Jerusalem owed her ruin to the fanaticism and obstinate 
blindness of her citizens ; from all of which her Redeemer 
came to emancipate her. Had they understood, " Blessed 
are the poor in spirit," " Blessed are the meek," and " Blessed 
are the peacemakers ;" had they understood that, Jerusalem's 
day of ruin might never have come. 

Now let us apply this to the day we are at present cele- 
brating. We all know that this destruction of Jerusalem is 
connected with the second coming of Christ. In St. Matthew 
the two advents are so blended together that it is hard to 
separate one from the other ; nay, rather, it is impossible, be- 
cause we have our Master's words, " Yerily, I say unto you, 
this generation shall not pass till all be fulfilled." Therefore 
this prophecy, in all its fullness, came to pass in the destruc- 
tion of Jerusalem. Bat it is impossible to look at it without 
perceiving there is also something farther included ; we shall 
understand it by turning to the elucidation given by our 
Lord Himself When the apostles asked. Where shall all 
these things be ? His reply was, in effect, this : Ask you 
where ? T tell you, nowhere in particular, or rather, every- 
where ; for wheresoever there is corruption, there will be 
destruction — " where the carcass is, thither will the eagles be 
gathered together." So that this first coming of the Son of 
Man to judgment was the type, the specimen of what shall 
be hereafter. 

And now, brethren, let us apply this subject still more 



824 Three Times in a Nations History. 

home. Is there no such thing as blindness among our- 
selves ? May not this be our day of visitation ? First, there 
is among us priestly blindness ; the blindness of men who 
know not that the demands of this age are in advance of 
those that have gone before. There is no blindness greater 
than that of those who think that the panacea for the evils 
of a country is to be found in ecclesiastical union. But let 
us not be mistaken : it is not here, we think, that the great 
danger lies. We dread not Rome. No man can understand 
the signs of the times, who does not feel that the day of 
Rome is passing away, as that of Jerusalem once did. But 
the danger lies in this consideration — we find that where the 
doctrines of Rome have been at all successful, it has been 
among the clergy and upper classes ; while, when presented 
to the middle and lower classes, they have been at once re- 
jected. There is, then, apparently, a gulf between the two. 
If there be added to the difference of position a still further 
and deeper difference of religion, then who shall dare to say 
what the end shall be ? 

Once more : we look at the blindness of men talking of 
intellectual enlightenment. It is true that we have more 
enlightened civilization and comfort. What then ? will that 
retard our day of judgment? Jerusalem was becoming 
more enlightened, and Rome was at its most civilized point, 
when the destroyer was at their gates. 

Therefore, let us know the day of our visitation. It is not 
the day of refinement, nor of political liberty, nor of advan- 
cing intellect. We must go again in the old, old way ; we 
must return to simpler manners and to a purer life. We 
want more faith, more love. The life of Christ and the 
death of Christ must be made the law of our life. Reject 
that, and we reject our own salvation ; and, in rejecting that, 
we bring on in rapid steps, for the nation and for ourselves, 
the day of judgment and of ruin. 



InsHration. 825 



XXVIII. 
INSPIRATION. 

*'We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and 

not to please ourselves. Let eveiy one of us please his neighbor for his good 
to edification. For even Christ pleased not himself; but, as it is written. 
The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me. For whatsoever 
things wei-e written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through 
patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope. " — Rom. xv. 1-4. 

We will endeavor, brethren, to search the connection be- 
tween the different parts of these verses. 

First, the apostle lays down a Christian's duty — " Let 
every one of us please his neighbor for his good to edifica- 
tion." After that he brings forward as the sanction of that 
duty, the spirit of the life of Christ — " For even Christ 
pleased not Himself" Next, he adds an illustration of that 
principle by a quotation from Psalm Ixix : " It is written. 
The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me." 
Lastly, he explains and defends that application of the 
psalm, as if he had said, '' I am perfectly justified in apply- 
ing that passage to Christ, for ' whatsoever things were 
written aforetime were written for our learning.' " 

So that in this quotation, and the defense of it as con- 
tained in these verses, we have the principle of apostolical 
interpretation ; we have the principle upon which the apos- 
tles used the Old Testament Scriptures, and we are enabled 
to understand their view of inspiration. This is one of the 
most important considerations upon which we can be at this 
moment engaged. It is the deepest question of our day : 
the one which lies beneath all others, and in comparison of 
which the questions just now agitating the popular mind — 
whether of Papal jurisdiction or varieties of Church doc- 
trine in our own communion — are but superficial : it is this 
grand question of inspiration which is given to this age to 
solve. 

Our subject will break itself up into questions such as 
these : What the Bible is, and what the Bible is not ? 
What is meant by inspiration? Whether inspiration is the 
same thing as infallibility ? When God inspired the minds, 
did He dictate the words ? Does the inspiration of men 
mean the infallibility of their words ? Is inspiration the 
Bame as dictation ? Whether, granting that we have the 



826 Inspiration. 

Word of God, we have also the words of God ? Are the op 
erations of the Holy Spirit, inspiring men, compatible with 
partial error, as His operations in sanctifying them are com- 
patible with partial evil ? How are we to interpret and ap' 
ply the Scriptures ? Is Scripture, as the Romanists say, so 
unintelligible and obscure that we can not understand it 
without having the guidance of an infallible Church ? Or is 
it, as some fanciful Protestants will tell us, a book upon 
which all ingenuity may be used to find Christ in every sen- 
tence ? Upon these things there are many views, some of 
them false, some superstitious ; but it is not our business 
now to deal with these ; our way is rather to teach positive- 
ly than negatively: we will try to set up the truth, and 
error may fall before it. 

The collect for this day leads us to the special considera- 
tion of Holy Scripture ; We shall therefore take this for our 
subject, and endeavor to understand what was the apostoli- 
cal principle of interpretation. 

In the text we find two principles : first, that Scripture is 
of universal application ; 

And second, that all the lines of Scripture converge to- 
wards Jesus Christ. 

First, then, there is here a universal application of Scrip- 
ture. This passage quoted by the apostle is from the sixty- 
ninth Psalm. That was evidently spoken by David of him- 
self. From first to last, no unprejudiced mind can detect a 
conception in the writer's mind of an application to Christ, 
or to any other person after him ; the psalmist is there full 
of himself and his own sorrows. It is a natural and touching 
exposition of human grief and a good man's trust. Never- 
theless, you will observe that St. Paul extends the use of 
these words, and applies them to Jesus Christ. Nay, more 
than that, he uses them as belonging to all Christians ; for, 
he says, " Whatsoever things were written aforetime, were 
written for our learning." Now this principle will be more 
evident if we state it in the words of Scripture, "Knowing 
that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpreta- 
tion :" those holy men spake not their own limited individual 
feelings, but as feeling that they were inspired by the Spirit 
of God. Their words belonged to the whole of our common 
humanity. No prophecy of the Scriptures is of any private 
interpretation. Bear in mind that the word prophecy does 
not mean what we now understand by it — merely prediction 
of future events — in the Scriptures it signifies inspired teach- 
ing. The teaching of the prophets was by no means always 
prediction. Bearing this in mind, let us remember that the 



Inspiration. 8 ? 7 

fipostle says it is of no private interpretation. Had the Psalm 
applied only to David, then it would have been of private 
interpretation — it would have been special, limited, particu- 
lar ; it would have belonged to an individual ; instead of 
which, it belongs to humanity. Take again the subject of 
which w^e spoke last Sunday — the prophecy of the destruc- 
tion of Jerusalem. Manifestly that was spoken originally at 
Jerusalem ; in a manner it seemed limited to Jerusalem, for 
its very name was mentioned ; and besides, as we read this 
morning, our Saviour says, " This generation shall not pass 
until all be fulfilled." 

But had the prophecy ended there, then you would still 
have had prophecy, but it would have been of private — that 
is, peculiar, limited — interpretation ; whereas our Redeemer's 
principle was this : that this doom pronounced on Jerusalem 
w^as universally applicable, that it w^as but a style and speci- 
men of God's judgments. The judgment-coming of the Son 
of Man takes place wherever there is evil grown ripe, when- 
ever corruption is complete. And the gathering of the 
Roman eagles is but a specimen of the way in which 
judgment at last overtakes every city, every country and 
every man in whom evil has reached the point where there 
is no possibility of cure. 

So that the prophecy belongs to all ages, from the de- 
struction of Jerusalem to the end of the world. The words 
of St. Matthew are universally applicable. For Scripture 
deals with principles ; not with individuals, but rather with 
states of humanity. Promises and threatenings are made 
to individuals, because they are in a particular state of 
character ; but they belong to all who are in that state, for 
" God is no respecter of persons." 

First, we wdll take an instance of the state of blessing. 

There was blessing pronounced to Abraham, in which it 
will be seen how large a grasp on humanity this view of 
Scripture gave to St. Paul. The whole argument in the 
Epistle to the Romans is, that the promises made to Abra- 
ham were not to his person, but to his faith ; and thus the 
apostle says, " They who are of faith, are blessed with faith- 
ful Abraham." 

We will now take the case of curse or threatening. Jonah, 
by Divine command, w^ent through Nineveh, proclaiming its 
destruction ; but that prophecy belonged to the state in 
which Xineveh was ; it was true only while it remained in 
that state ; and therefore, as they repented, and their state 
was thus changed, the prophecy was left unfulfilled. From 
this we perceive the largeness and grandeur of Scripture in* 



S 2 S Inspzrdh'oit. 

terpretation. In the Epistle to the Corinthians, we find the 
apostle telling of the state of the Jews in their passage to- 
wards the promised land, their state of idolatry and glut- 
tony, and then he proceeds to pronounce the judgments 
that fell upon them, adding that he tells us this not merely 
as a matter of history, but rather as an illustration of a prin- 
ciple. They are specimens of eternal, unalterable law. So 
that whosoever shall be in the state of these Jews, whosoever 
shall imitate them, the same judgments must fall upon them, 
the same satiety and weariness, the same creeping of the 
inward serpent polluting all their feelings ; and therefore he 
says, "All these things happened unto them for ensamples." 
Again, he uses the same principle, not as a private, but a 
general application ; for he says, " There hath no temptation 
taken you but such as is common to man." 

We will take now another case, applied not to nations, 
but to individuals. In Hebrews xiii. we find these words 
from the Old Testament, " I will never leave thee nor for- 
sake thee ;" and there the apostle's inference is that we may 
boldly say, " The Lord is my helper, I will not fear what 
men shall do unto me." Now, when we refer to Scripture, 
we shall find that this was a promise originally made to 
Jacob. The apostle does not hesitate to take that promise 
and appropriate it to all Christians; for it was made, not to 
Jacob as a person, but to the state in which Jacob was ; it 
was made to all who, like Jacob, are wanderers and pilgrims 
in the world ; it was made to all whom sin has rendered out- 
casts and who are longing to return. The promises made to 
the meek belong to meekness ; the promises made to the 
humble belong to humility. 

And this it is which makes this Bible, not only a blessed 
book, but our book. It is this universal applicability of 
Scripture which has made the influence of the Bible uni- 
versal : this book has held spell-bound the hearts of nations, 
in a way in which no single book has ever held men before. 
Remember, too, in order to enhance the marvellousness of 
this, that the nation from which it emanated was a despised 
people. For the last eighteen hundred years the Jews have 
been proverbially a by-word and a reproach. But that con- 
tempt for Israel is nothing new to the world, for before even 
the Roman despised them, the Assyrian and Egyptian re- 
garded them with scorn. Yet the words which came from 
Israel's prophets have been the life-blood of the world's de- 
votions. And the teachers, the psalmists, the prophets, and 
the lawgivers of this despised nation spoke out truths that 
have struck the key-note of the heart of man ; and this, not 



Inspiratioji, ' 829 

because they were of Jewish, but just because they were of 
universal application. 

This collection of books has been to the world what no 
other book has ever been to a nation. States have been 
founded on its principles. Kings rule by a compact based on 
it. Men hold the Bible in their hands when they prepare to 
give solemn evidence affecting life, death, or property; the 
sick man is almost afraid to die unless the book be within 
reach of his hands ; the battle-ship goes into action with 
one on board whose office is to expound it ; its prayers, 
its psalms are the language which we use when we speak to 
God ; eighteen centuries have found no holier, no diviner 
language. If ever there has been a prayer or a hymn 
enshrined in the heart of a nation, you are sure to find its 
basis in the Bible. There is no new religious idea given 
to the world, but it is merely the development of something 
given in the Bible. The very translation of it has fixed 
language and settled the idioms of speech. Germany and 
England speak as they speak because the Bible was trans- 
lated. It has made the most illiterate peasant more familiar 
with the history, customs, and geography of ancient Palestine 
than with the localities of his own country. Men who know 
nothing of the Grampians, of Snowden, or of Skiddaw, are 
at home in Zion, the Lake of Gennesareth, or among the rills 
of Carmel. People who know little about London, know 
by heart the places in Jerusalem where those blessed feet 
trod which were nailed to the cross. Men who know noth- 
ing of the architecture of a Christian cathedral, can yet tell 
you all about the pattern of the holy temple. Even this 
shows us the influence of the Bible. The orator holds a 
thousand men for half an hour breathless — a thousand men 
as one, listening to his single word. But this Word of God 
has held a thousand nations for thrice a thousand years spelt" 
bound ; held them by an abiding power, even the universali 
ty of its truth ; and we feel it to be no more a collection of 
books, but the book. 

We pass on now to consider the second principle contained 
in these words, which is, that all Scripture bears towards 
Jesus Christ. St. Paul quotes these Jewish words as fulfilled 
in Christ. Jesus of Nazareth is the central point in which 
all the converging lines of Scripture meet. Again we state 
this principle in Scripture language : in the book ot Revela- 
tion we find it written, " The testimony of Jesus is the spirit 
of prophecy," that is, the sum and substance of prophecy, 
the very spirit of Scripture is to bear testimony to Jesus 
Christ. We must often have been surprised and perplexed 



830 * Inspiration, 

at the way in which the apostles quote passages in reference 
to Christ which originally had no reference to Him. In our 
text, for instance, David speaks only of himself, and yet 
St. Paul refers it to Christ. Let us understand this. We 
have already said that Scripture deals not with individuals, 
but with states and principles. Promises belong to persons 
only so far as they are what they are taken to be ; and con- 
sequently all unlimited promises made to individuals, so far 
as they are referred merely to those individuals, are necessa- 
rily exaggerated and hyperbolical. They can only be true 
of One in whom that is fulfilled which was unfulfilled in 
them. 

We will take an instance. We are all familiar with the 
well-known prophecy of Balaam. V/e all remember the 
magnificent destinies he promised to the people whom he 
was called to curse. Those promises have never been fulfill- 
ed, neither from the w^hole appearance of things does it seem 
likely that they ever will be fulfilled in their literal sense. 
To whom, then, are they made ? To Israel ? Yes ; so far as 
they developed God's own conception. Balaam says, " God 
hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither hath He seen per- 
verseness in Israel." Is this the character of Israel, an idol- 
atrous and rebellious nation ? Spoken of the literal Israel, 
this prophecy is false ; but it was not false of that spotless- 
ness and purity of which Israel was the temporal and imper- 
fect type. If one can be found of whom that description is 
true, of whom we can say, the Lord hath not beheld iniquity 
in him, to him then that prophecy belongs. 

Brethren, Jesus of Nazareth is that pure and spotless One. 
Christ is perfectly, all that every saint was partially. To 
Him belongs all : all that description of a perfect character^ 
which would be exaggeration if spoken of others, and to this 
character the blessing belongs ; hence it is that all the frag- 
mentary representations of character collect and centre in 
Him alone. Therefore, the apostle says, " It was added until 
the seed should come to whom the promise Avas made." 
Consequently St. Paul would not read the Psalm as spoken 
only of David. Were the lofty aspirations, the purity and 
humbleness expressed in the text, true of him, poor, sinful, err- 
ing David ? These were the expressions of the Christ within 
his heart — the longing of the Spirit of God within Him ; but 
they were no proper representation of the spirit of his life, 
for there is a marvellous difference between a man's ideal 
and his actual — between the man and the book he writes — a 
difference between the aspirations within the man and the 
character which is realized by his daily life. The promises 



Inspiration, 831 

are to the Christ within David ; therefore they are applied to 
the Christ when He comes. Now, let us extract from that 
this application. 

Brethren, Scripture is full of Christ. From Genesis to 
Revelation every thing breathes of Him, not every letter of 
every sentence, but the spirit of every chapter. It is full of 
Christ, but not in the way that some suppose ; for there is 
EOthing more miserable, as specimens of perverted ingenuity, 
than the attempts of certain commentators and preachers to 
find remote, and recondite, and intended allusions to Christ 
everywhere. For example, they chance to find in the con- 
struction of the temple the fusion of twQ metals, and this 
they conceive is meant to show the union of Divinity with 
Humanity in Christ. If they read of coverings to the taber- 
nacle, they find implied the doctrine of imputed righteous- 
ness. If it chance that one of the curtains of the tabernacle 
be red, they see in that the prophecy of the blood of Christ. 
If they are told that the kingdom of heaven is a pearl of great 
price, they will see it in the allusion — that, as a pearl is the 
production of animal suifering, so the kingdom of heaven is 
produced by the sufferings of the Redeemer. I mention this 
perverted mode of comment, because it is not merely harm- 
less, idle, and useless ; it is positively dangerous. This is to 
make the Holy Spirit speak riddles and conundrums, and the 
interpretation of Scripture but clever riddle-guessing. Put- 
ting aside all this childishness, we say that the Bible is full 
of Christ. Every unfulfilled aspiration of humanity in the 
l^ast ; all partial representation of perfect character ; all sac- 
rifices, nay even those of idolatry, point to the fulfillment of 
what we want, the answer to every longing — the type of 
perfect humanity, the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Get the habit — a glorious one — of referring all to Christ. 
How did He feel? — think? — act? So then must I feel, and 
think, and act. Observe how Christ was a living reality in 
St. Paul's mind. "Should I please myself?" "For even 
Christ pleased not Himself;" "It is more blessed to give 
than to receive." 



83'^ The Last Utter apices of Christ, 



XXIX. 
THE LAST UTTERANCES OF CHRIST. 

"When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished? 
ind he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost." — John xix. 30. 

There are seven dying sentences of our Lord's recorded 
\n the Gospels; one recorded conjointly by St. Matthew and 
St. Mark, three recorded by St. Luke, and three by St. John. 
That recorded by the first two evangelists is, "My God, my 
God, why hast thou forsaken me ?" Those preserved by St. 
Luke only are, " Verily, I say unto thee, to-day shalt thou be 
with me in paradise ;" " Father, forgive them, for they know 
not what they do ;" and, " Father, into Thy hands I com- 
mend my Spirit." The three recorded by St. John are these : 
"I thirst;" "Behold thy mother; behold thy son;" and 
lastly, " It is finished." And these seven group themselves 
into two divisions : we perceive that some of them are the 
utterances of personal feeling, and others are the utterances 
of sympathy for others. 

These are, therefore, the two divisions of our subject to 
day— 

I. The natural exclamations of the Man. 
11. The utterances of the Saviour. 

The first of those which we class under the exclamations 
of the Man, referring to His personal feelings, is, " I thirst ;" 
in answer to which they gave Him vinegar to drink. Now 
upon first reading this, we are often tempted to suppose, from 
the unnatural character of the draught, that an insult was 
intended ; and therefore we rank this among the taunts and 
fearful sufferings which He endured at His crucifixion. But 
as we become acquainted with Oriental history, we discover 
that this vinegar was the common drink of the Roman army, 
their wine, and therefore was the most likely to be at hand 
when in the company of soldiers, as He then was. Let it be 
borne in mind that a draught was twice offered to him: once 
it was accepted, once it was refused. That which was re- 
fused was the medicated potion — wine mingled with myrrh 
• — the intention of which was to deaden pain, and therefore 
when it was presented to the Saviour it was rejected. And 
f}.« T.oQ«5on commonly assigned for that seems to be the true 



The Last Utterances of Christ. 833 

one : tlie Son of Man would not meet death in a state of stu- 
pefaction, He chose to meet His God awake. 

There are two modes in whicli pain may he struggled with 
■ — through the flesh, and through the spiiit ; tlie one is the 
office of the physician, the other that of the Christian. The 
physician's care is at once to deaden pain either by insensi- 
bility or specifics; the Christian's object is to deaden pain 
by patience. We dispute not the value of the physician's 
remedies, in their Avay they are permissible and valuable ; but 
yet let it be observed that in these there is nothing moral ; 
they may take away the venom of the serpent's sting, but 
they do not give the courage to plant the foot upon the ger- 
pent's head, and to bear the pain without flinching. There- 
fore the Redeemer refused, because it was not through the 
flesh, but through the Spirit, that He would conquer ; to 
have accepted the anodyne w^ould have been to escape from 
suffering, but not to conquer it. But the vinegar or sour 
wine was accepted as a refreshing draught, for it would seem 
that He did not look upon the value of the suffering as con- 
sisting in this, that He should make it as exquisite as possible, 
but rather that He should not suffer one drop of the cup of 
agony which His Father had put into His hand to trickle 
down the side untasted. Neither would He make to Him- 
self one drop more of suffering than His Father had given. 

There are books on the value of pain ; they tell us that if 
of two kinds of food the one is pleasant and the other nau- 
seous, we are to choose the nauseous one. Let a lesson on 
this subject be learnt from the Divine example of our Master. 

To suiili pain for others without flinching, that is our 
'aste.'s ei^ca tuple ; but pain for the mere sake of pain, that is 
lot Christian ; to accept poverty in order to do good for oth- 
ers, that is our Saviour's principle ; but to become poor for 
the sake and the merit of being poor, is but selfishness after 
all. Our Lord refused the anodyne that would have made 
the cup untasted which His Father had put into His hand 
to drink, but He would not taste one drop more than His 
Father gave him. Yet He did not refuse the natural solace 
which His Father's hand had placed before Him. 

There are some who urge most erroneously the doctrine 
of discipline and self-denial. If of two ways one is disagree- 
able, they will choose it, just because it is disagreeable ; be- 
cause food is pleasant and needful, they will fast. There is 
in this a great mistake. To deny self for the sake of duty is 
right — to sacrifice life and interests rather than principle is 
right ; but self-denial for the mere sake of self-denial, torture 
for torture's sake, is neither o^ood nor Christlike. Remem- 

2d 



834 l^f^^ Last Utterances of Christ, 

ber, He drank the cooling beverage in tlie very moment of 
the sacrifice ; the value of which did not consist in its being 
made as intensely painful as possible, but in His not flinching 
from the pain, when love and duty said, Endure. 

His second exclamation was, " My God, my God, why hast 
Thou forsaken me ?" We will not dive into the deep mysteries 
of that expression — we w^ill not pretend to be wiser than 
what is written, endeavoring to comprehend where the human 
is mingled with the Divine — we will take the matter simply 
as it stands. It is plain from this expression that the Son of 
God felt as if He had been deserted by His Father. We 
know that He was not deserted by Him, or else God had 
denied Himself, after saying, " This is my beloved Son, in 
whom I am well pleased." And they who maintain that 
this was real desertion, attribute that to the Lord of Love 
which can alone belong to Judas — the desertion of innocence 
— therefore we conclude that it arose from the infirmities of 
our Master's innocent human nature. It was the darkening 
of His human soul, not the hiding of God's countenance. He 
was worn, faint, and exhausted ; His body was hanging from 
four lacerated w^ounds ; and more than that, there was much 
to perplex the Redeemer's human feelings, for He was suffer- 
ing there, the innocent for the guilty. For once God's law 
seemed reversed ; and then came the human cry, ''' My God, 
my God, why hast Thou forsaken me ?" 

And now^, brethren, observe in this, that it arose apparently 
from the connection of the Redeemer's death with sin. When 
the death-struggle of the flesh begins, and we first become 
aware of the frailty of our humanity, then the controversy of 
God with the soul is felt to be real by reason of our con- 
sciousness of sin ; then is felt, as it were, the immense gulf 
that separates between the pure and the impure. In the 
case of the Son of Man this was, of course, impossible ; con- 
sciousness of sin He had none, for He had no sin ; but there 
was a connection, so to speak, between the death of Christ 
and sin, for the apostle says, " In that He died. He died unto 
sin once." " He died unto sin ;" there was a connection be- 
tw^een His death and sin, though it was not His own sin, but 
the sin of the whole world. In that moment of the apparent 
victory of evil, the Redeemer's spirit, as it would appear, felt 
a darkness similar to ours when sin has hidden our conscious- 
ness of God. When death is merely natural, we can feel 
that the hand of God is there ; but when man interferes, and 
the hand of God is invisible, and that of man is alone seen, 
then all seems dark and uncertain. The despondency of 
the Redeemer w^as not supernatural, but most natural dark- 



The Last Utterances of Christ. 835 

ness. The words He used were not his own, but David'?, 
words ; and this proclaims that suffering such as He was then 
bearing had been borne before Him — the difference was in de^ 
gree, not in kind. The idea of piety struggling with, and victo- 
rious over evil, had been exhibited on earth before. The idea 
was imperfectly exhibited in the sufferings of Israel regard- 
ed as typical of Christ. In Christ alone is it perfectly pre- 
sented. So also that wondrous chapter, the lifty-third of 
Isaiah, justly describing both, belongs in its entireness to 
Christ : He therefore adopted these words as His own. 

The last personal ejaculation of our Redeemer was, 
" Father, into Thy hands I commend my Spirit." We take 
this in connection w^th the preceding ; for if we do not, the 
two will be unintelligible, but taking them together, it be- 
comes plain that the darkness of the Redeemer's mind was 
but momentary. For a moment the Redeemer felt alone 
and deserted, and then, in the midst of it. He cried out, 
"Father, into Thy hands I commend my Spirit." In that 
moment He realized His inseparable union with the Father. 

And now I would observe, if I may do it without being 
misunderstood, 'that the Redeemer speaks as if not knowing 
where He was going — " Into Thy hands," that is sufficient. 
It is as well to look at these things as simply as possible. 
Do not confuse the mind with attempting to draw the dis- 
tinction between the human and the Divine. He speaks 
here as if His human soul, like ours, entered into the dark 
unknown, not seeing what was to be in the hereafter : and 
this is faith, or, if it were not so, there arises an idea from 
which we shrink, as if He were speaking words He did not 
feel. We know nothing of the world beyond, we are like 
children ; even revelation has told us almost nothing con- 
cerning this, and an inspired apostle says, " We know not 
yet what we shall be." Then rises faith, and dares to say, 
" My Father, I know nothing, but, be where I may, still I 
am with Thee;" "Into Thy hands I commend my Spirit." 
Therefore, and only therefore, do we dare to die. 

We pass on, secondly, to the consideration of those utter- 
ances which our Master spake as the Saviour of the world. 
The first is, " Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
they do." From this expression we infer two things : first, 
that sin needs forgiveness ; and, secondly, that forgiveness 
can be granted. 

Sin needs forgiveness, or the Redeemer would not have so 
prayed. That it needs forgiveness we also prove, from the 
fact that it always connects itself with penalty. Years may 
separate the present from your past misconduct, but the re* 



'J 



6 The Last Utterances of Christ. 



membrance of it remains; nay, more than that, even, those 
errors which we did ignorant! y carry with them their retri- 
bution ; and from this we collect the fact that even errors, 
failures in judgment, need God's forgiveness. Another 
proof that sin needs pardon is from the testimony of con- 
science. In all men it speaks, in some in but a feeble w^his- 
per, in others with an irregular sound, now a lull, and then a 
storm of recollection; in others, conscience is as a low per- 
petual knell, ever sounding, telling of the death going on 
within, proclaiming that the past has been accursed, the pres 
ent withered, and that the future is one vast terrible blank. 

In these several forms, conscience tells us also that the 
sin has been committed against our Father. The perma- 
nence of all our acts, the eternal consequences of every small 
thing done by man, all point to God as the One against 
whom the sin is committed ; and, therefore, that voice still 
speaks, though the thing we have done never can be undone. 
The other thing that we learn from that utterance of Christ 
is, that the pardon of sin is a thing possible, for the utterance 
of Christ was the expression of the voice of God — it was 
but another form of the Father saying, " I can and I will for- 
give." 

Remark here a condition imposed by Christ on the Divine 
forgiveness when He taught His disciples to pray : " If ye 
foi'give men from your hearts, your Father will forgive you ; 
but if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in 
heaven forgive you." It is natural to forgive on a dying 
bed ; yet that forgiveness is only making a merit of necessity, 
for we can revenge ourselves no more. There Is abundance 
of good-natured charity abroad in the world; that charity 
which is indiscrimiiiating. It may co-exist with the resent- 
ment of personal injury, but the spirit of forgiveness which 
we must have before we can be forgiven, can be ours only 
so far as our life is a representative of the life of Christ. 
Then it is possible for us to realize God's forgiveness. 

The second utterance which our Lord spake for others 
rather than Himself was, "To-day shalt thou be with me in 
paradise." 

Now, what we have here to observe on is the law of per- 
sonal influence ; the dying hour of Christ had an influence 
over one thief — he became converted. The first thing we 
remark is, that indirect influence often succeeds where di- 
rect influence has failed. Thus, when the Redeemer select- 
ed His disciples, and endeavored to teach them His truth, 
that was direct influence ; but when He prayed for them, and 
those disciples heard Him. and then came to Him with this 



The Last Utterances of Christ. 837 

petition, "Lord, teach us to pray," that was indirect in- 
fluence ; and so in this instance, while praying for Himself, 
He did influence the mind of the dying thief, though that 
influence was indirect. Indirect influence is often far more 
successful than that which is direct ; and for this reason, 
the direct aims that we make to convert others may be con- 
tradicted by our lives, while the indirect influence is our very 
life. What we really are, somehow or other, will ooze out, 
in tone, in look, in act, and this tells upon those who come in 
daily contact with us. The law of personal influence is mys- 
terious. The influence of the Son of God told on the one 
thief, not on the other ; it softened and touched the hearts 
of two of His hearers, but it only hardened others. There 
is much to be learnt from this, for some are disposed to write 
bitter things against themselves because their influence on 
earth has failed. Let all such remember that some are too 
pure to act universally on others. If our influence has failed, 
the Redeemer's was not universal. 

The third utterance of our Master on the cross, for others, 
not for himself, was, " Behold thy mother!" He who was dy- 
ing on the cross, whose name was Love, was the great philan- 
thropist, whose charity embraced the whole human race. 
His last dying act was an act of individual attachment — ten- 
derness towards a mother, fidelity towards a friend. Now 
some well-meaning persons seem to think that the larger 
charities are incompatible with the -indulgence of particular 
aflijctions ; and therefore, all that they do, and aim at, is on 
a large scale — they occupy themselves with the desire to 
emancipate the whole mass of mankind. But, brethren, it 
not unfrequently happens that those who act in this manner 
are but selfish after all, and are quite inattentive to all the 
fidelities of friendship and the amenities of social life. It 
was not so, if we may venture to say it. that the Spirit of the 
Redeemer grew, for as He progressed in wisdom and knowl- 
edge. He progressed also in love. First, we read of His ten- 
derness and obedience to His parents, then the selection of 
twelve to be near Him from the rest of the disciples, and 
then the selection of one, more especially, as a friend. It 
was through this, that, apparently. His human soul grew in 
grace and in love. And if it were not so with Him, at all 
events it must be so with us. It is in vain for a man in his 
dying hour, who has loved no man individually, to attempt 
lo love the human race ; every thing here must be done by 
legrees. Love is a habit. God has given to us the love of 
relations and friends, the love of father and mother, brother, 
sister, friend, to prepare us gradually for the love of God ; if 



838 The Last Utterances of Christ. 

there be one stone of the foundation not securely laid, tht 
superstructure will be imperfect. The domestic affections . 
are the alphabet of love. I| 

Lastly, our Master said, " It is finished," partly for others, ' ' 
partly for Himself In the earliest part of His life, we read 
that He said, " I have a baptism to be baptized with ;" to 
Him, as to every human soul, this life had its side of darkness 
and gloom, but all that was now accomplished : He has drunk 
His last earthly drop of anguish. He has to drink the wine 
no more till he drink it new in his Father's kingdom. It was 
finished ; all was over ; and with, as it were, a burst of sub- 
dued joy. He says, " It is finished." I 

There is another aspect in which we may regard these ■ 
words as spoken also for others. The way in which our Re- 
deemer contemplated this life was altogether a peculiar one. 
He looked upon it, not as a place of rest or pleasure, but 
simply, solely, as a place of duty. He was here to do his 
Father's will, not his own ; and therefore, now that life was 
closed, he looked upon it chiefly as a duty that was fulfilled. 
We have the meaning of this in the seventeenth chapter of 
this Gospel : " I have glorified Thee on earth, I have finished 
the work which Thou gavest me to do." The duty is done, 
the work is finished. Let us each apply this to ourselves. 
That hour is coming to us all ; indeed it is, perhaps, now 
come. The dark night settles down on each day. 

"It is finished." Wc are ever taking leave of something 
that will not come back again. We let go, with a pang, 
portion after portion of our existence. However dreary wt 
may have felt life to be here, yet when that hour comes — ^\v^ 
winding up of all things, the last grand rush of i:irkiiess on 
our spirits, the hour of that awful sudden wrench from all 
we have ever known or loved, the long farewell t<- suu, moon, 
stars, and light — brother men, I ask you this day, and I ask 
myself, humbly and fearfully, What will then be finished ? 
When it is finished, what will it be ? Will it be the butter- 
fly existence of pleasure, the mere life of science, a life of un- 
interrupted sin and selfish gratification ; or will it be, " Fa- 
ther, I have finish id the work Avhich Thou gavest me to do T^ 



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